Assessing LEO Satellite Networks for National Emergency Failover
Vaibhav Bhosale, Ying Zhang, Sameer Kapoor, and 8 more authors
In Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC ’25), 2025
In this paper, we study the viability of LEO networks as a failover network. We contextualize our analysis by framing the capacity of satellite networks relative to lost capacity due to submarine cable failure. Specifically, we focus on scenarios where LEO networks act as failovers for submarine cables, providing a concrete target capacity to be fulfilled by the satellite network. We introduce a new model and simulator that help us estimate the failover capacity. We identify key factors determining the actual capacity available on the satellite network: the total area of the country, the terminal distribution policy used by the government, the spectrum allocation and traffic engineering policies used by the LEO network operator. Based on our findings, we make policy recommendations to governments that can result in an increase of up to 1.8× in the failover capacity without requiring additional infrastructure. However, we find after implementing all our recommendations, with 200k terminals deployed and no competing traffic in the network, a satellite network can only satisfy 0.9-14.7% of the capacity lost due to submarine cable failure in four out of six case studies.