Authors: Owen Perrin, Jinwei Zhao
Prof. Jianping Pan and his team at the University of Victoria (UVic), Canada, have leveraged the ARA platform to conduct studies on low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite networks. Using ARA’s user portal and with support from the ARA team, the UVic team was able to carry out experiments with a Hughes user terminal and the OneWeb satellite network.
LEO satellite networks are characterized by dynamic behavior due to the high mobility of satellites. As these networks gain broader adoption, understanding their performance and effectively managing them becomes increasingly important. To address this, the UVic team has measured latency, throughput, and other network characteristics using ARA’s OneWeb satellite access infrastructure. The unique location of the ARA platform, in relation to the OneWeb terrestrial infrastructure, offers an excellent opportunity to assess disruptive handover and reconfiguration events. The detailed study has been reported in the research article “Measuring the OneWeb Satellite Network” at the 2025 IEEE/IFIP Network Traffic Measurement and Analysis Conference (TMA’25), and it offers data-driven insights and feedback to the satellite communications research community and LEO network operators such as OneWeb.
The UVic team made use of the ARA’s OneWeb user terminal deployment atop the ISU Wilson Hall base station site, featuring a Hughes HL1120W user terminal (UT). Users can reserve the associated machine in the ARA user portal, allowing them to perform measurements through the Hughes terminal and OneWeb satellite network. Users may refer to the ARA documentation for the experimental setup, which results in the creation of a container connected to the satellite terminal. After the container is created, measurements through the satellite network may be performed. As an example, we perform a 15-minute “ping” test and plot the resulting latencies in the figure below, then plot the corresponding satellite locations during the period of interest alongside the AIM diagnostic data. Satellite two-line element (TLE) data may be queried from sources such as Celestrak. The interesting bimodal behavior caused by ARA’s unique location can be observed from the figure, at approximately 18:14 UTC when the UT experienced a handover to satellite ONEWEB-0321. At this time, the orbital plane of ONEWEB-0321 was much further west than the orbit of the other satellites being used. As such, the traffic’s route and latency are effectively doubled, due to handovers between different OneWeb landing ground stations.
Utilizing ARA’s satellite component allows researchers to access and assess OneWeb, a satellite service which remains under-studied due to its enterprise focus. OneWeb has many properties which make it interesting for satellite communications research. Its constellation design, with polar orbits and relatively high altitude compared to Starlink, lends the network to stable coverage with less frequent inter-satellite handovers.
Authors’ Background:
In this past year, a team of students worked on a comprehensive measurement study on OneWeb low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite networks. The study, which utilizes the ARA platform, will be presented at TMA’25 in June 2025, and is available at https://arawireless.org/ara-use-in-research/. Two of the students, Owen Perrin and Jinwei Zhao, write about their experience in this ARA user story. Perrin is a recent graduate from the MS program in Computer Engineering at Iowa State University. Zhao is a PhD student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Victoria, Canada. His research interests include network measurements of LEO satellite networks (Starlink/OneWeb), application layer adaptation such as adaptive video streaming, and new protocols such as multipath QUIC.