[Starlink] In-Network Bloat?

["Bless, Roland (TM)" <roland.bless@kit.edu>]

Hi,

> Please? newer folk here, please briefly introduce yourselves and your
> interests in starlink's stuff?

So, I'm Roland and an academic interested in low latency congestion
control and buffer sizing. I've read several academic papers about
Starlink and other LEO constellations (see exemplary list below).
Several papers emphasized the advantages of reducing the
propagation delay for longer distances using Starlink (with or
without inter-satellite links, e.g., see both papers from Mark Handley).
My impression was, that the latency improvement is in a range that can
be easily rendered void in case buffer bloat happens inside the
satellites during forwarding (either via ISL to other satellites or
to ground relays).

So bufferbloat inside the terminals is one factor, but how about
bufferbloat during forwarding inside Starlink? Do the satellites
use FIFO and tail drop or at least some AQM?

Regards,
  Roland


[BhSi19] Bhattacherjee D. and Singla A. Network topology design at 
27,000 km/hour Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on 
Emerging Networking Experiments And Technologies (CoNext), pp. 341–354, 
2019, https://doi.org/10.1145/3359989.3365407

[GKLB+20] Giuliari G., Klenze T., Legner M., Basin D., Perrig A. and 
Singla A. Internet backbones in space. ACM SIGCOMM Computer 
Communication Review, 50:1, 2020, pp. 25–37, Online publication date: 
23-Mar-2020. https://doi.org/10.1145/3390251.3390256

[Hand18] Handley M. Delay is Not an Option: Low Latency Routing in 
Space. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks 
(HotNets ’18). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 
pp. 85–91, 2018. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3286062.3286075

[Hand19] Handley M. Using ground relays for low-latency wide-area 
routing in megaconstellations Proceedings of the 18th ACM Workshop on 
Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets ‘19), 2019, Association for Computing 
Machinery, New York, NY, USA, pp. 125–132,
https://doi.org/10.1145/3365609.3365859