StarCDN: Moving Content Delivery Networks to Space
William X. Zheng, Aryan Taneja, Maleeha Masood, Anirudh Sabnis, Ramesh K. Sitaraman, Deepak Vasisht · 2025
Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite networks, such as Starlink, provide global internet access and currently serve content to millions of users. Recent work has shown that existing network infrastructures, such as Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), are not well-suited to satellite network architectures. Traditional terrestrial CDNs degrade performance for satellite network users and do not alleviate the congestion in the ground-satellite links. We design StarCDN, a new CDN architecture that caches content in space to improve user experience and reduce ground-satellite bandwidth usage. The fundamental challenge in designing StarCDN lies in the orbital motion of satellites, which causes each satellite's coverage area to change rapidly, serving vastly different regions (e.g., US and Europe) within minutes. To address this, we introduce new consistent hashing and relayed fetching schemes tailored to LEO satellite networks. Our design enables cached content to flow in the opposite direction of the orbital motion to counter satellite motion. We evaluate StarCDN against multiple baselines using real-world traces from Akamai. Our evaluation demonstrates that StarCDN can reduce the ground-to-satellite bandwidth utilization by 80% and improve user-perceived latency by 2.5X. Further, we make available an open-source trace generator, SpaceGEN, for realistic simulations of satellite-based CDNs.