NovaPlan: An Efficient Plan of Renting Ground Stations for Emerging LEO Satellite Networks

Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) Satellite Networks (LSNs) are promising to provide wide Internet access and high-quality network services. Such potentials attract more operators to construct their own LSNs, e.g.,Amazon Kuiper and Telesat. Typically, in an LSN the ground stations (GSs) enable the space-to-ground transmissions. However, due to the long construction period, high cost, and geographical restrictions, it is difficult for those operators whose LSNs are under construction to build sufficient geo-distributed GSs in the short term. Therefore, early-stage LSNs may suffer from poor network reachability under the quality of service (QoS) constraints due to the lack of GSs. Based on the emergence of “Ground-Station-as-a-Service (GSaaS)”, we present Novaplan,a novel GS planning mechanism that can guide operators of developing LSNs to rent GSaaS services and schedule their traffic to guarantee high network availability in a cost-effective manner. Specifically, to efficiently solve the renting GS problem (RGP) with performance constraints, Novaplanaggregates adjacent timeslots without drastic topology changes to decrease the GS combinatorial space and determines the renting policy of individual GS to lower the total cost. Moreover, NOVAplanjudiciously schedules traffic to the path within latency constraints. Extensive evaluations based on real-world constellation information show that NOVAPLAN outperforms existing solutions with nearly 100% service rate and the lowest cost.