Limitation and Future Work

Experimental scope and limitations. Our STARRY NET framework mainly targets at various network-level experiments for ISTNs, e.g., evaluating a new routing/transport-layer protocol, or assessing the network performance of a new topology design in a highly-dynamic, resource constrained virtual ISTN environment. The scale of the experiment supported by STARRY NET is closely related to the underlying resources provided by physical machines. In its present form, the key limitation of STARRY NET can be summarized as follows. First, STARRY NET is essentially a data-driven framework combining constellation-relevant modeling and network emulation. Thus its fidelity tightly depends on the availability and accuracy of the public information shared by the satellite ecosystem. For example, in practice, public TLE data may provide inaccurate orbit information, which can have errors up to 12 km, and such errors can affect the calculation of network performance (e.g., inter-satellite visibility and propagation delay). Second, some parameters are hard to obtain from a practical satellite system today, because most mega-constellations are still in their early stage with limited access. For example, it is difficult to obtain the real ISL-enabled Starlink performance right now, since Starlink’s laser ISLs are still under internal test. Thus, STARRY NET allows researchers to manually configure the ISL parameters (e.g., link capacity) and customize their experiments based on various experimental requirements. Third, our framework is primarily based on virtualization-based network-level emulation, and thus it has limited ability to emulate physical layer (PHY) characteristics that can be observed in a live network experiment, e.g., spectrum adaptation and multiplexing [42], or the time consumed by a real satellite dish to detect PHY connectivity changes.

STARRY NET作为ISTN网络层实验框架，主要面向路由/传输层协议验证、拓扑设计评估等网络级研究，其局限性体现在：

1. 数据依赖性
   • 轨道精度受TLE数据误差影响（最大达12公里）
   • 星间链路(ISL)等参数依赖人工配置（当前实际数据获取受限）
2. 物理层仿真限制
   • 无法精确模拟频谱自适应等物理层特性
   • 终端物理连接检测时延等底层行为需简化建模
3. 资源扩展边界
   • 实验规模受物理机资源约束
   • 超大规模星座仿真需分布式架构优化

Future work. Satellite Internet mega-constellations are still evolving rapidly. New constellation designs are constantly being proposed, and existing constellation schemes are constantly being updated. In our future work, we will follow the evolution and deployment of realistic satellite Internet constellations. In particular, we will track the latest constellation information to update STARRY NET’s open database, calibrate the constellation models and further improve the fidelity of the STARRY NET framework. Moreover, based on these implications obtained from our case studies in §7, we will explore new network techniques tailored for ISTNs, e.g., practical and resilient satellite routing protocols in the future. Our latest research progress on STARRY NET will be updated on the website: https://github.com/SpaceNetLab/StarryNet.

未来期待:

1. 数据库动态更新
   • 跟踪最新星座部署信息（如星链ISL实测数据）
   • 建立多源数据融合校准机制
2. 协议栈创新
   • 开发高韧性卫星路由协议
   • 设计适应动态拓扑的传输层机制
3. 跨层仿真扩展
   • 集成物理层特征建模
   • 支持星上计算与网络联合优化

项目最新进展将通过GitHub仓库持续更新，为ISTN研究社区提供开放实验平台。