Measuring Mobile Starlink Performance: A Comprehensive Look
With the recent success of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite networks, such as SpaceX’s Starlink, measuring their performance has been of great interest to the community. While stationary Starlink performance has been extensively assessed on a globalized view, mobile - in-motion - usage is...
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IEEE
2025-01-01
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| Series: | IEEE Open Journal of the Communications Society |
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| Online Access: | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10877858/ |
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| author | Dominic Laniewski Eric Lanfer Nils Aschenbruck |
| author_facet | Dominic Laniewski Eric Lanfer Nils Aschenbruck |
| author_sort | Dominic Laniewski |
| collection | DOAJ |
| description | With the recent success of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite networks, such as SpaceX’s Starlink, measuring their performance has been of great interest to the community. While stationary Starlink performance has been extensively assessed on a globalized view, mobile - in-motion - usage is relatively new. A first look at its performance has only been taken by three studies so far. In this paper, we take a comprehensive look at mobile Starlink performance from the measurement perspective by answering the following three research questions: (1) How does mobile Starlink performance differ in different regions of the world? (2) How does the mobile performance compare to stationary performance? (3) How does obstruction impact mobile performance? To answer these questions, we conduct our own 300 km long test-drive on the German Autobahn (highway) with car velocities up to 140 km/h. We compare our results to the datasets of the other three studies and to stationary measurements. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to deeper analyze the impact of obstructions on the performance. For this, we map bridges crossing the highway to our measurements and find that these short total obstructions cause significant burst packet loss, RTT spikes, and throughput drops. We show that mobility-induced instabilities can have a severe negative impact on the performance of higher-level applications such as HTTP bulk file transfer. |
| format | Article |
| id | doaj-art-bdc12358335b4b1eb6b327df3c0eaa1b |
| institution | OA Journals |
| issn | 2644-125X |
| language | English |
| publishDate | 2025-01-01 |
| publisher | IEEE |
| record_format | Article |
| series | IEEE Open Journal of the Communications Society |
| spelling | doaj-art-bdc12358335b4b1eb6b327df3c0eaa1b2025-08-20T02:26:45ZengIEEEIEEE Open Journal of the Communications Society2644-125X2025-01-0161266128310.1109/OJCOMS.2025.353983610877858Measuring Mobile Starlink Performance: A Comprehensive LookDominic Laniewski0https://orcid.org/0009-0004-4782-8224Eric Lanfer1https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9763-4613Nils Aschenbruck2https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5861-8896Institute of Computer Science, Osnabrück University, Osnabrück, GermanyInstitute of Computer Science, Osnabrück University, Osnabrück, GermanyInstitute of Computer Science, Osnabrück University, Osnabrück, GermanyWith the recent success of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite networks, such as SpaceX’s Starlink, measuring their performance has been of great interest to the community. While stationary Starlink performance has been extensively assessed on a globalized view, mobile - in-motion - usage is relatively new. A first look at its performance has only been taken by three studies so far. In this paper, we take a comprehensive look at mobile Starlink performance from the measurement perspective by answering the following three research questions: (1) How does mobile Starlink performance differ in different regions of the world? (2) How does the mobile performance compare to stationary performance? (3) How does obstruction impact mobile performance? To answer these questions, we conduct our own 300 km long test-drive on the German Autobahn (highway) with car velocities up to 140 km/h. We compare our results to the datasets of the other three studies and to stationary measurements. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to deeper analyze the impact of obstructions on the performance. For this, we map bridges crossing the highway to our measurements and find that these short total obstructions cause significant burst packet loss, RTT spikes, and throughput drops. We show that mobility-induced instabilities can have a severe negative impact on the performance of higher-level applications such as HTTP bulk file transfer.https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10877858/Datasetflat high performanceLEOLEO measurementmeasurementmobility |
| spellingShingle | Dominic Laniewski Eric Lanfer Nils Aschenbruck Measuring Mobile Starlink Performance: A Comprehensive Look IEEE Open Journal of the Communications Society Dataset flat high performance LEO LEO measurement measurement mobility |
| title | Measuring Mobile Starlink Performance: A Comprehensive Look |
| title_full | Measuring Mobile Starlink Performance: A Comprehensive Look |
| title_fullStr | Measuring Mobile Starlink Performance: A Comprehensive Look |
| title_full_unstemmed | Measuring Mobile Starlink Performance: A Comprehensive Look |
| title_short | Measuring Mobile Starlink Performance: A Comprehensive Look |
| title_sort | measuring mobile starlink performance a comprehensive look |
| topic | Dataset flat high performance LEO LEO measurement measurement mobility |
| url | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10877858/ |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT dominiclaniewski measuringmobilestarlinkperformanceacomprehensivelook AT ericlanfer measuringmobilestarlinkperformanceacomprehensivelook AT nilsaschenbruck measuringmobilestarlinkperformanceacomprehensivelook |