L2D2: Low Latency Distributed Downlink for Low Earth Orbit Satellites

Large constellations of Low Earth Orbit satellites promise to provide near real-time high-resolution Earth imagery. Yet, getting this large amount of data back to Earth is challenging because of their low orbits and fast motion through space. Centralized architectures with few multi-million dollar ground stations incur large hour-level data download latency and are hard to scale. We propose a geographically distributed ground station design, L2D2, that uses low-cost commodity hardware to offer low latency robust downlink. L2D2 is the first system to use a hybrid ground station model, where only a subset of ground stations are uplink-capable. We design new algorithms for scheduling and rate adaptation that enable low latency and high robustness despite the limitations of the receive-only ground stations. We evaluate L2D2 through a combination of trace-driven simulations and real-world satellite-ground station measurements. Our results demonstrate that L2D2’s geographically distributed design can reduce data downlink latency from 90 minutes to 21 minutes.