Welcome to LEOCONN 2021! I will very briefly describe the boom in both imaging and broadband applications of LEO networking, and summarize numerous open networking research challenges relevant to many of the key players in the LEO ecosystem. My talk will thus lay out the framing for the rest of the program.

Space industry upstarts are deploying thousands of satellites to offer global Internet service. These plans promise large improvements in coverage and latency, and could fundamentally transform the Internet. But what if this transformation extends beyond network transit into a new type of computing service? What if each satellite, in addition to serving as a network router, also offers cloud-like compute, making the new constellations not just global Internet service providers, but at the same time, a new breed of cloud providers offering "compute where you need it"?

Large constellations of Low Earth Orbit satellites promise to provide near real-time high resolution Earth imagery. Such constellations will collect terabytes of data that needs to be shipped to Earth. Getting this data to Earth is challenging and can often take several hours to days before it is available to the user. This defeats the purpose of large constellations and frequent imagery and can be crippling to latency sensitive applications like disaster management and geopolitical analysis. In this talk, I will discuss our use of edge computing and distributed ground station architectures to reduce the latency in accessing earth observation data from hours to minutes.

This session will demonstrate how adoption of virtualization and integration with cloud hyper-scalers high-performance networks will help minimize the ground segment design and operation costs, allowing more scale and flexibility to meet new requirements.

As satellite constellations increasingly require flexible and scalable capabilities, this presentation highlights the advantages of using an existing ground station network transformed into a globally integrated "ground station cloud" as opposed to the traditional ground station networks primarily designed to support the needs of one or few satellites with consistent contact needs.

In this talk, I will start with providing an overview of Planet Labs, our founding mission, and a summary of what Planet has built to-date to serve the Earth Observation/Geospatial community. In the second part of the talk, I will focus on the satellite communication network reliability and the throughput requirements that are needed to meet a mission as large as Planet's. I follow that with discussing how Planet has effectively tackled these objectives by using the agile aerospace philosophy of rapid prototyping and iterative design.

Panelists:
Yves Pitsch (Microsoft)
Katherine Monson (KSAT Inc.)
Kiruthika Devaraj (Planet Labs)
Gint Atkinson (SES Satellites)
Host: Ankit Singla (ETH Zürich)

I will kick-off day 2, where the focus is on the ``LEO constellations for providing broadband'' aspect.

Upstart space companies are building massive constellations of low-flying satellites to provide Internet service. These developments comprise “one giant leap” in Internet infrastructure, promising global coverage and lower latency. However, fully exploiting the potential of such satellite constellations requires tackling their inherent challenges: thousands of low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites travel at high velocities relative to each other, and relative to terrestrial ground stations. The resulting highly-dynamic connectivity is at odds with the Internet’s design, which assumes a largely static core infrastructure. Virtually every aspect of Internet design — physical interconnection, routing, congestion control, and application behavior — will need substantial rethinking to integrate this new building block.

Internet service based on low Earth orbit satellites promises to bring global low-latency connectivity and broadband access to rural areas. These two use-cases alone are enough to stir great excitement in industry and academia. However, we argue that for exploiting their full potential, we should tightly integrate satellite networks with the terrestrial Internet.

This talk discusses threats and security vulnerabilities impacting the security and privacy of customers using modern VSAT broadband services from GEO. In it, we see how adaptations to the physical dynamics of space have incentivized poor security practices. The result is that terabytes of deeply sensitive information, ranging from data belonging to Fortune 500 companies to individual passengers aboard aircraft, are available to attackers using simple home-television equipment. We demonstrate these attacks on real-world systems, showing how minor shifts in threat-models can significantly impact the security of space networks. By delving into the underlying causes of these issues, we detail how studying the security mistakes in these older GEO systems can help inform our efforts to design more secure and robust next-generation LEO networks.