Our paper "It's a bird? It's a plane? It's CDN!: Investigating Content Delivery Networks in the LEO Satellite Networks Era" has been accepted at ACM HotNets 2024! Led by Rohan Bose with contributions from Saeed Fadaei, Mohamed Kassem, Prof. Nishanth Sastry, Prof. Jörg Ott, and myself, this work investigates how Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) operate over Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite networks, specifically focusing on Starlink.
Our research reveals how major CDNs like Cloudflare, Fastly, and Akamai behave over Starlink, the impact of satellite handoffs and ground station locations on latency patterns, content delivery performance across different regions, how CDN caching strategies adapt (or don't) to satellite links, and operational insights for content providers and network operators. The measurements span multiple continents (Africa, Europe, Asia, North America), various CDN providers, extended time periods capturing network evolution, and diverse content types including web, video, and downloads.
This work is critical because 70-80% of Internet traffic goes through CDNs for video streaming, web content, and software updates, while LEO satellites are becoming a significant access technology. Understanding this intersection is crucial for future Internet architecture. The paper was later recognized as Best Paper Runner-up at HotNets 2024 and contributed to the IETF/IRTF Applied Networking Research Prize (ANRP 2025).
As LEO satellite networks continue to expand, understanding content delivery over these links will only become more important for CDN design, protocol optimizations, and infrastructure planning.
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