LEO Satellite Communication Simulation Framework for Connected Vehicles

The growing demand of connected vehicles for high-speed, pervasive communication worldwide has led to a surge in the interest of adopting large Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite communications. However, the feasibility study and performance evaluation of LEO satellite communication for connected vehicles is challenging due to the high infrastructure costs involved. In this paper, we propose an integrated simulation framework with satellite mobility, vehicle mobility, and network simulators to study and evaluate the LEO satellite communication for connected vehicles. We first create a synthetic LEO satellite constellation with a demonstration of the orbital mobility and preliminary RTT latency over Japan. Then, we further investigate three scenarios in our developed simulation framework, showing that a comparable performance can be achieved refer to the existing commercialized StarLink services.