Our ANRP 2025 award-winning research on Starlink CDN performance was presented at the Measurement and Analysis for Protocols Research Group (MAPRG) session during IETF 123 in Madrid, Spain. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is the premier standards body for the Internet, and the MAPRG is one of the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) research groups focused on measurement-driven protocol design and analysis.
The presentation covered our comprehensive study on how Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) operate over Starlink's LEO satellite network, including CDN performance characteristics (how major CDNs like Cloudflare, Fastly, and Akamai behave over satellite links), our multi-year, multi-continent measurement methodology, key findings on latency patterns and throughput characteristics, and implications for network operators and protocol designers.
This work was recognized with the Applied Networking Research Prize (ANRP) 2025 from the IETF/IRTF, highlighting its significance to the Internet community. The ANRP award celebrates research that bridges the gap between academic work and practical deployment. Our study revealed several important insights: CDN performance over Starlink varies significantly based on location and time, the terrestrial component (ground stations) plays a critical role, orbital dynamics create interesting routing patterns, and content caching strategies differ from terrestrial CDN deployments.
The IETF community's feedback was invaluable, with network operators sharing their experiences deploying Starlink, protocol designers discussing implications for transport protocols, researchers proposing collaborations for future measurements, and standards bodies considering implications for Internet architecture. This research contributes to understanding how LEO satellite networks integrate with existing Internet infrastructure, performance tradeoffs for satellite-based connectivity, design considerations for protocols operating over satellite links, and future Internet architecture with satellite components.
