Overcoming the digital divide in rural and remote areas has always been a big challenge for Canada with its huge geographical area. In 2016, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission announced broadband Internet as a basic service available for all Canadians. However, approximately one million Canadians still did not have access to broadband services as of 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic has made the situation more challenging, as social, economic, and educational activities have increasingly been transferred online. The condition is more unfavorable for Indigenous communities. A key challenge in deploying rural and remote broadband Internet is to plan and implement high-capacity backbones, which are now available only in denser urban areas. For any Internet provider, it is almost impossible to make a viable business proposal in these areas. For example, the vast land of the Northwest Territories', Yukon's, and Nunavut's diverse geographical features present obstacles for broadband infrastructure. In this article, we investigate the digital divide in Canada with a focus on rural and remote areas. In so doing, we highlight two potential solutions using low Earth orbit (LEO) constellations to deliver broadband Internet in rural and remote areas to address the access inequality and the digital divide. The first solution involves integrating LEO constellations as a backbone for the existing 4G/5G telecommunications network. This solution uses satellites in a LEO constellation to provide a backhaul network connecting the 4G/5G access network to its core network. The 3rd Generation Partnership Project already specifies how to integrate LEO satellite networks into the 4G/5G network, and the Canadian satellite operator Telesat has already showcased this solution with one terrestrial operator, TIM Brasil, in their 4G network. In this way, users can seamlessly access broadband Internet via their mobile terminals. The second solution is based on the direct use of LEO constellations, such as Starlink, which are now operating in Canada, to deliver broadband Internet. As LEO satellites fly lower, their round-trip latency is lower, and the user terminals can receive Internet signals as long as they are pointing at the sky. An in-depth discussion of both solutions is presented in this work.

Internet content providers (ICPs) typically exploit content distribution networks (CDNs) to provide wide-area data access with high availability and low latency. However, our analysis on a large-scale trace collected from seven major CDN operators has revealed that: from a global perspective, there are still a large portion of users suffering from high user-perceived latency due to the insufficient deployment of terrestrial cloud infrastructures, especially in remote or rural areas where even the closest available cache server is too far away. This paper presents STAR FRONT, a cost-effective content distribution framework to optimize global CDNs and enable low content access latency anywhere. STAR FRONT collaboratively builds CDNs upon emerging low earth orbit (LEO) constellations and existing cloud platforms to satisfy the low latency requirements while minimizing the operational cost. Specifically, STAR FRONT exploits a key insight that emerging mega-constellations will consist of thousands of LEO satellites which can be equipped with high-speed data links and storage, and thus can potentially work as “cache in space” to enable pervasive and low-latency data access. STAR FRONT judiciously places replicas on either LEO satellite caches or terrestrial cloud caches, and dynamically assigns user requests to proper cache servers based on different constellation parameters, cloud/user distributions and pricing policies. We have implemented a STAR FRONT prototype in our testbed, and extensive trace-driven evaluations covering multiple geo-distributed vantage points have demonstrated that STAR FRONT can effectively reduce the global content access latency with acceptable operational cost under representative CDN traffic.

Integrating Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites with terrestrial network infrastructures to support ubiquitous Internet service coverage has recently received increasing research momentum. One fundamental challenge is the frequent topology change caused by the constellation behaviour of LEO satellites. In the context of Software Defined Networking (SDN), the controller function that is originally required to control the conventional data plane fulfilled by terrestrial SDN switches will need to expand its responsibility to cover their counterparts in the space, namely LEO satellites that are used for data forwarding. As such, seamless integration of the fixed control plane on the ground and the mobile data plane fulfilled by constellation LEO satellites will become a distinct challenge. For the very first time in the literature, we propose in this paper the Virtual Data-Plane Addressing (VDPA) scheme by leveraging IP addresses to represent virtual switches at the fixed space locations which are periodically instantiated by the nested LEO satellites traversing them in a predictable manner. With such a scheme the changing data-plane network topology incurred by LEO satellite constellations can be made completely agnostic to the control plane on the ground, thus enabling a native approach to supporting seamless communication between the two planes. Our simulation results prove the superiority of the proposed VDPA based flow rule manipulation mechanism in terms of control plane performance.