Publications Conference paper · Mega-constellations · 2026

Beyond the Cone Model: Quantifying the Impact of Beam-Level Constraints on LEO Satellite Networks

Wesley Woo, Tenzin Samten Ukyab, Juan A. Fraire, Scott Shenker, Sylvia Ratnasamy, and Shaddi Hasan

ACM Workshop on LEO Networking and Communication (LEO-NET), co-located with ACM SIGCOMM, pp. 1887–1893, 2026

Abstract

Existing LEO satellite network simulators widely approximate satellite coverage using a cone-based model that assumes uniform capacity distribution within a satellite's field of view. However, modern systems employ phased-array antennas that impose discrete beam constraints, fundamentally altering coverage characteristics. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which ignoring beam-level constraints biases network-level performance estimates. We introduce a simplified beam-aware model that captures beam count, capacity, and limited spatial reuse, and compare it against traditional cone-based approximations across a range of user distributions. Our results show that cone models can significantly overestimate service coverage, particularly under sparse or highly clustered demand, due to beam-count and beam-capacity exhaustion effects. We further analyze how beam-hopping and -stacking mitigate these limitations and quantify their impact on predicted coverage differences, demonstrating reductions in predicted coverage difference of 40% and 65% respectively. We position these results of our model as the first step towards higher-fidelity simulation to show the importance of modeling beams and we sketch directions for future work that further improves fidelity.

Cite

DOI 10.1145/3789240.3827588

BibTeX

@inproceedings{woo2026beyondcone,
  author    = {Woo, Wesley and Ukyab, Tenzin Samten and Fraire, Juan A. and Shenker, Scott and Ratnasamy, Sylvia and Hasan, Shaddi},
  title     = {Beyond the Cone Model: Quantifying the Impact of Beam-Level Constraints on {LEO} Satellite Networks},
  booktitle = {ACM Workshop on LEO Networking and Communication (LEO-NET), co-located with ACM SIGCOMM},
  pages     = {1887--1893},
  year      = {2026},
  doi       = {10.1145/3789240.3827588}
}

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