Demystifying Starlink Network Performance under Vehicular Mobility with Dynamic Beam Switching

2026-01-20

AI Summary

This study addresses the significant performance degradation of Starlink in mobile scenarios such as vehicular environments, where the underlying causes remain unclear and existing satellite identification methods struggle with terminal mobility, signal occlusion, and dynamic beam switching. To overcome these challenges, this work proposes the first satellite identification approach tailored for mobile settings. By analyzing user terminal diagnostic logs, the authors design a dynamic beam-switching detection algorithm and establish a link-quality-to-satellite association model. The investigation reveals that frequent beam switches—triggered by changes in the terminal’s field of view or transient occlusions—are the primary cause of performance deterioration. This insight breaks through the limitations of conventional methods, which are restricted to static, unobstructed environments, thereby providing critical foundations for optimizing transport protocols and informing real-world deployment strategies.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Mobility, Driving & Flight
• Search and Optimization: Evaluation and Analysis
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Scheduling under Uncertainty

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web performance, measurement, and characterization
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs

Abstract

In the last few years, considerable research efforts have focused on measuring and improving Starlink network performance, especially for user terminals (UTs) in stationary scenarios. However, the performance of Starlink networks in mobility settings, particularly with frequent changes in the UT's orientation, and the impact of environmental factors, such as transient obstructions, has not been thoroughly studied, leaving gaps in understanding the causes of performance degradation. Recently, researchers have started identifying the communicating satellites to evaluate satellite selection strategies and the impact on network performance. However, existing Starlink satellite identification methods only work in stationary, obstruction-free scenarios, as they do not account for UT mobility, obstructions or detect dynamic beam switching events. In this paper, we reveal that the UT can perform multiple dynamic beam switching attempts to connect to different satellites when the UT-satellite link is degraded. This degradation can occur either due to the loss of line-of-sight (LoS) from changes in the FOV or obstructions, or due to poor signal quality, extending UT-satellite handovers beyond the well-known 15-second regular handover interval. We propose a mobility-aware Starlink satellite identification method that detects dynamic beam switching events, and plausibly explain network performance using UT's diagnostic data and connected satellite information. Our findings demystifies the mobile Starlink network performance degradations, which is crucial to enhance the end-to-end performance of transport layer protocols and in diverse application scenarios.

Problem

• Starlink
• vehicular mobility
• dynamic beam switching
• satellite identification
• network performance degradation

Innovation

• dynamic beam switching
• Starlink satellite identification
• vehicular mobility
• line-of-sight obstruction
• mobility-aware networking