CBL - Campus del Baix Llobregat

Projecte llegit

Títol: Digital gap reduction in rural isolated areas through wideband communications over Low Earth Orbit satellite constellations

Estudiants que han llegit aquest projecte:

Director/a: ÚBEDA FARRE, EDUARD

Departament: TSC

Títol: Digital gap reduction in rural isolated areas through wideband communications over Low Earth Orbit satellite constellations

Data inici oferta: 16-07-2020     Data finalització oferta: 16-03-2021


Estudis d'assignació del projecte:
    GR ENG SIS TELECOMUN
Tipus: Individual
 
Lloc de realització: EETAC
 
Paraules clau:
Low earth orbit satellite; digital gap; digital divide; StarLink; OneWeb; rural internet; rural wideband; megaconstellations; LEO; Kuiper; Internet access; internet;
 
Descripció del contingut i pla d'activitats:
Over the last decade, fast-speed communications, (i.e. 4G mobile telephony and optic fiber), have provided wideband access to homes with (at least) 100 Mbps, in the frame of the European Digital Agenda. The main operators have deployed such networks mainly in densely populated areas, where the number of users makes up for the great economic effort required. In consequence, the European digital agenda has been accomplished mainly in urban or sub-urban areas, where most of the population lives. However, there still exist rural isolated areas, with low population density and far away from the fiber routes, which cannot benefit from these new technologies because the deployment of such networks are just too costly. In particular, the disadvantage of these regions is twofold: (1) low connection speed; (2) restricted number of working operators, which translates into less quality of service to the user.
Other broadband communication standards have provided meritorious speeds of connection in rural areas in the past; namely, (1) wireless (Local-Multipoint Distribution Service; Wi-MaX), (2) through copper telephone lines, such as the asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL), or (3) through geosynchronous satellites. However, these technologies nowadays appear less and less competitive in terms of connection speed or latency as compared with the 4G cellular or optic fiber technologies, which are slowly entering rural areas. Recently, several operators have started to deploy new constellations of low earth-orbit (LEO) satellites. This technology appears nowadays mature enough to provide high-speed and low-latency communications also in rural areas, and therefore compete with the well settled 4G or optic fiber technologies. This work aims to assess the capacity for the LEO constellations to provide in isolated rural areas similar quality of service as the 4G or FTTH deployments and with less cost. It is also the purpose of this work to judge whether the LEO constellations are ready to mitigate (if not cancel) the well-known digital gap in rural isolated areas.
 
Overview (resum en anglès):
There is an international consensus about considering internet access as a need, as a right that humanity needs to ensure to achieve a homogeneous development around the world, without differences.

However, even in the most developed countries, the inequality in internet access is clear: the most habited and developed places enjoy fast, stable and reliable internet connections, while the less populated and less developed areas lack it.

The projects of Low Earth Orbit satellite constellations are back to be considered as an alternative to connect the world, after years being considered non-viable because of the failure of the similar projects undertaken a couple of decades before. Nowadays, technological progress allows to afford the economic costs of the implementation, even scaling its size, ranging from the 66 satellites of Iridium¿s constellation to the hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of satellites for just one megaconstellation.

In this work, we make an analysis of two of the most popular projects of megaconstellations at their initial stage, StarLink and OneWeb, in order to assess their performance, their coverage, and the suitability of their topology design. This study is made with the StarPerf software, developed by Tsinghua¿s University scientists.

Lastly, the controversies around megaconstellations projects are reviewed, assessing the practical suitability of such technology and the potential threats they can arise in the area of astrophysics.

© CBLTIC Campus del Baix Llobregat - UPC