I presented our ANRP 2025 award-winning research on Starlink CDN performance at RIPE 90, the 90th meeting of the RIPE (Réseaux IP Européens) community. RIPE is the forum for all parties interested in the technical aspects of the Internet in Europe and beyond, bringing together network operators and ISPs, Internet infrastructure providers, researchers and academics, policy makers and regulators, and anyone interested in Internet operations.
Our presentation "It's a bird? It's a plane? It's CDN!" focused on our groundbreaking measurements of how Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) operate over Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite networks, specifically Starlink. The key insights shared include how major CDNs like Cloudflare, Fastly, and Akamai perform over Starlink links, unique latency patterns in satellite-based content delivery, understanding the terrestrial component (ground station infrastructure) of LEO networks, and operational implications for network operators.
This work, which earned us the IETF/IRTF Applied Networking Research Prize (ANRP) 2025, reveals that CDNs show varying performance characteristics over LEO satellite links, ground station location significantly impacts end-to-end latency, satellite handoffs create interesting routing dynamics, and cache behavior differs from traditional terrestrial CDN deployments.
The RIPE community's feedback was invaluable, with operators sharing real-world experiences deploying Starlink in production networks, ISPs discussing peering arrangements with satellite providers, researchers proposing collaboration opportunities for future measurements, and policy discussions around addressing and routing for satellite networks. Our research has been recognized with the ANRP 2025 Award from IETF/IRTF, Best Paper Runner-up at ACM HotNets 2024, featured RIPE Labs article, and coverage in Rest of World News on satellite Internet in Africa.
Our findings have practical implications for network planning (understanding satellite links in hybrid networks), CDN strategy (optimizing content delivery over satellite connections), peering decisions (evaluating satellite connectivity for redundancy), and capacity planning (predicting performance in satellite-connected regions). True to the spirit of the RIPE community, our measurement methodology and datasets are openly available for other researchers and operators to build upon, reflecting our commitment to transparency and reproducibility in Internet measurements.