Concept and evaluation of 5G backhauling via starlink
Simon Heine, Florian Völk, Robert T. Schwarz, Andreas Knopp
Abstract
Non-Geostationary Satellite Orbit (NGSO) constellations enable a variety of use cases due to their low latency. In particular, the use of 5G backhauling in transport networks is promising to provide cellular connectivity in rural areas or for disaster relief. In this paper, we investigate the potential of the Starlink constellation for non-public cellular networks. We measure the round-trip time and the performance of typical transport protocols such as UDP, TCP and QUIC. Additionally, we examine the system's application-specific performance in web browsing, Voice over IP, and video streaming. Our results show that the NGSO satellite constellation can be used for backhauling of 5G base stations with average rates of 100 Mbit/s in the downlink and 10 Mbit/s in the uplink.