There's been a lot happening in the Space industry lately, mainly centred around SpaceX. With their Starship SN3 and SN4 already under construction, they're gearing up for a test flight for some time now. In parallel to their Starship project, SpaceX also has the Starlink Satellite Constellation being launched into space, with 360 satellites in orbit already.
For those of you who don't know about Starlink project, it's a satellite constellation for global internet coverage to even the most remote parts of the world, with very low latency (as opposed to high latency which made previous attempts for satellite internet useless) enabled by their planned tens of thousands of low-earth-orbit satellites. The Starlink Network has fascinated as well as terrified the technical community as it would surely disrupt the traditional internet service providing.
On that note, let's dive in. Starlink satellites are designed to revolutionize the internet by the fast delivery of data packets. With packets travelling through the vacuum between the Starlink satellites at the maximum speed of light, the speed of communication will surely surpass the traditional fibre-optic cables as its speed is hindered by the medium being glass. But the problem of low-earth-orbit satellites is that they're not geostationary, and they're constantly moving. For ground-based routing of internet traffic, this problem never comes up, and the routing table was formed using different IP ranges corresponding to different internet service providers in the topmost level, which becomes region-specific up to a point and hence routing is relatively simple. Here, however, devices from all over the world are getting connected to a single service provider (maybe SpaceX plans to use the unused IPv6 so that every device connected could take up a single IP range), routing becomes a huge task (as opposed to IP ranges divided among ISPs and almost entirely consistent routing tables).
I'm not sure how SpaceX has tackled the routing in this scenario, but I'm guessing they've tethered each device's IP address to the location of the Starlink satellite (at the time) that communicated with the said device. If that's the case, the assigned IP address is no longer the primary routing information used to deliver packets. The satellites are using the GPS coordinates of the destination as the primary address (much like a real address!). Does that mean that the GPS address of the device is what's actually needed? Doesn't it appear similar to how IP addresses replaced MAC addresses for routing traffic for a larger area at the start of the networking era so that the software decided the address and not the hardware? Now, it seems that hardware decides the address after all!
If GPS addressing is what's actually needed, then it can be implemented without any new technology (maybe SpaceX already has). Much like the first 3 bytes of a MAC address indicating the manufacturer, the first few bytes of the IPv6 address of the device could be used to indicate the GPS coordinates (accurate to a city, maybe), and then the remaining bytes assigned by DHCP (or maybe just use the MAC address for the device specificity; surely IPv6 is large enough to accommodate both location of the device and the name of the device [name being the MAC address], much like the address of a real person and their name).
It's just a thought but it would surely make it easy to understand the origin of the data packet and its destination for anyone, not just a machine. Routing traffic would become very easy for the satellites because it wouldn't need to store gigantic routing tables (just store static IPs, which wouldn't be much). It can also help in communication between two people from different points on the map, without a third party; using just a device ID (could be MAC ID, or can be a personal ID of the user; reserved with the ISP (for free)?) and the location (a city, having an approximate GPS coordinates for networking), which would currently require us to remember the IP address or use a third party service.
It seems very much possible and useful, at least to me.
P.S. I'm not an expert at networking. Had a random thought, which seemed like a worthy talk.
