  Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite networks are rapidly gaining traction today.
Although several real-world deployments exist, our preliminary analysis of LEO
topology performance with the soon-to-be operational Inter-Satellite Links
(ISLs) reveals several interesting characteristics that are difficult to
explain based on our current understanding of topologies. For example, a
real-world satellite shell with a low density of satellites offers better
latency performance than another shell with nearly double the number of
satellites. In this work, we conduct an in-depth investigation of LEO satellite
topology design parameters and their impact on network performance while using
the ISLs. In particular, we focus on three design parameters: the number of
orbits in a shell, the inclination of orbits, and the number of satellites per
orbit. Through an extensive analysis of real-world and synthetic satellite
configurations, we uncover several interesting properties of satellite
topologies. Notably, there exist thresholds for the number of satellites per
orbit and the number of orbits below which the latency performance degrades
significantly. Moreover, network delay between a pair of traffic endpoints
depends on the alignment of the satellite's orbit (Inclination) with the
geographic locations of endpoints.
