Mega Constellation Networks are Reliable against Geographical Failure

The reliability of low Earth orbit (LEO) mega constellation networks (MCNs) under large-scale geographical failure of satellites remains unrevealed. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to assess the connectivity, average latency and hop count by considering topology changes resulting from geographical failure, under different topology management. Numerical simulations are conducted based on the traffics source from end users distributed among the 100 most populous cities. The results show that the MCNs are generally reliable against geographical failure, as a geographical failure with a radius of 3000 km can at most disconnect 8% of the end users, while increasing the average hop count and latency of the remaining users by less than 10%. Also, topology reconfiguration after failure have a greater impact on the hop count than latency.