Grant: Research Tools and Instruments

2nd-generation low-earth-orbit (LEO) satellite networks (LSNs), exemplified by SpaceX's Starlink, Eutelsat's OneWeb, Amazon's Project Kuiper and Telesat Canada's Lightspeed, promise to revolutionize the Internet access around the world on all Earth surface and above. Thus the research community has an urgent need to understand them specifically and further improve LSNs in general. However, many researchers are limited by the access to such systems due to availability, location, financial and expertise constraints. With a team of researchers across Canada specialized in computer networks, distributed systems, satellite communications, security and privacy, and cloud computing, this proposal builds a coast-to-coast-to-coast LSN testbed for Canada, leveraging the team's experience particularly in building individual LSN test nodes and federating through remote access, accelerating the team's research in LSN performance, reliability and security, and fostering collaboration in the research community and with industry across Canada and beyond. Specifically, the testbed will deploy at least one LSN testbed node in each province and territory of Canada, ideally in northern, remote and indigenous regions, given the geo-diversity needed for LSN research. The testbed nodes also provide Internet access to the hosts and their local communities if needed, given the separate virtual local area networks and end-to-end encryption without compromising user privacy, for at least one year supported by the proposal with following years supported by local initiatives through the economic development enabled by the Internet access and external sponsorship. The testbed will be remotely and centrally managed through the regional and national centers hosted by the team, maximizing the uptime and utility of all testbed nodes, and scheduling and prioritizing measurement and test tasks submitted by researchers and collaborators within or beyond the team, similar to what Planetlab contributed to the distributed systems research in early 2000s. The testbed code and measurement data will be open sourced and released to the research community, enabling trace-driven simulation and statistical analysis worldwide, liberating Internet access in general and specifically LSN research traditionally limited to population centers and financially viable institutions. With Canadian users at priority, the testbed will also federate with other similar ones in the US and around the world, e.g., LEOScope led by the University of Surrey, to have a true global coverage while allowing international users to explore Canadian geographic and demographic features, including those in arctic regions. The testbed strives for self-sustainability after initial investment by providing a leveled test range for LSN service providers to compete, a training ground for highly qualified personnel for Canadian industry, and a playground to attract K-12 and particularly indigenous kids to have a technical career.