Hongjun Xie

Hongjun Xie, Jiahang Zhu, Zhiming Shao et al.

Starlink, as a representative low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite broadband system, makes high-bitrate video streaming possible in regions where terrestrial broadband is unavailable. However, its access links exhibit rapid throughput fluctuations caused by satellite mobility and handovers. Existing learned adaptive bitrate (ABR) algorithms can achieve high average quality of experience (QoE), yet high-bitrate Starlink streaming exposes severe session-level rebuffering that is not captured by average QoE alone. To address it, this paper proposes SafeSABR, a risk-calibrated learned ABR framework for Starlink networks. SafeSABR formulates Starlink ABR as a QoE--severe-risk tradeoff and follows a three-stage design: behavior-cloning pretraining learns a high-QoE ABR prior, risk-calibrated reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning reduces severe-tail action tendencies, and a runtime safety auditor uses safe-capacity lower bounds to check policy-requested bitrates before execution. Experiments on real Starlink traces compare SafeSABR with online, prediction-assisted, and learned ABR baselines. Compared with advanced methods, SafeSABR reduces severe-stall sessions from 22.8% to 7.2% and worst-5% session rebuffering from 54.30 s to 22.68 s, with a 1.8% QoE cost. Component analyses further show that risk-calibrated fine-tuning and safe-capacity auditing reduce unsafe bitrate decisions and downstream severe-session rebuffering. These results show that combining risk-calibrated policy learning with decision-aware safe throughput forecasting can move learned ABR toward a safer QoE--severe-risk operating point under volatile Starlink networks.

Hongjun Xie, Chao Zhang, Pengcheng Luo et al.

As a representative low Earth orbit (LEO) broadband system, Starlink exhibits highly variable access throughput, making short-term forecasting essential for network resource management. Existing forecasting methods mainly optimize symmetric point-prediction metrics such as MAE and RMSE, but they do not explicitly control the asymmetric risk of overestimating future throughput, which can cause over-admission, bandwidth overbooking, and service violations. This paper formulates Starlink throughput prediction as a risk-budgeted safe forecasting problem, where the predictor must satisfy a prescribed overestimation budget while maintaining competitive accuracy. We propose Budget-Guided Coarse-to-Fine Quantile Selection (BG-CFQS), a data-driven framework that trains a family of lower-quantile predictors, locates the quantile boundary satisfying the risk budget, and refines the boundary region to select the most accurate feasible predictor. Experiments on three real-world Starlink throughput datasets show that BG-CFQS satisfies the risk budget on all datasets and achieves the lowest average MAE, mean positive error, and tail positive error among budget-feasible methods. In high-risk and severe-risk low-throughput regimes, BG-CFQS reduces harmful positive errors by 11.0% and 12.6%, respectively. An admission-control evaluation further shows that the proposed safe forecasts reduce dropped sessions, demonstrating that risk-aware forecasting can translate prediction safety into application-level benefits.