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 awarded the IETF/IRTF Applied Networking Research Prize (ANRP) 2025! The IETF/IRTF Applied Networking Research Prize recognizes the best research papers in the field of networking, highlighting work that bridges the gap between academic research and practical deployment with significant contributions to the Internet's architecture and protocols.
Hendrik Cech presenting our research at IETF 123 MAPRG session
This groundbreaking work, led by PhD student Hendrik Cech in collaboration with Rohan Bose, Saeed Fadaei, Mohamed Kassem, Prof. Nishanth Sastry, and Prof. Jörg Ott, investigates how content delivery networks (CDNs) perform over Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite networks, specifically focusing on Starlink. Our study reveals critical insights into CDN performance characteristics over LEO satellite networks, latency and throughput patterns in satellite-based content delivery, and implications for future Internet infrastructure design.
The research has already made waves in the networking community, being presented at ACM HotNets 2024 (27.8% acceptance rate, later recognized as Best Paper Runner-up), featured at the IETF 123 MAPRG session, covered by Rest of World News in their reporting on Starlink's African impact, and recognized as runners-up in the RIPE Labs article competition.
This award is a testament to the collaborative spirit and research excellence at SPEAR Lab. Special congratulations to Hendrik Cech as the lead awardee and to the entire research team for this outstanding achievement! We continue to explore the intersection of LEO satellite networks and Internet infrastructure with ongoing measurements and analysis of next-generation satellite networks.
