An experimental evaluation of satellite constellation emulators

TL;DR

This paper evaluates three open-source satellite constellation emulators by comparing their outputs with real-world data to identify strengths and weaknesses for research applications.

Contribution

It provides an in-depth comparative analysis of existing satellite emulators, highlighting current limitations and future research directions.

Findings

StarryNet, OpenSN, and Celestial emulators have varying accuracy levels.

Current emulators show notable discrepancies from real-world measurements.

The study suggests improvements for more realistic satellite emulation.

Abstract

Satellite emulation software is essential for research due to the lack of access to physical testbeds. To be useful, emulators must generate observations that are well-aligned with real-world ones, and they must have acceptable resource overheads for setting up and running experiments. This study provides an in-depth evaluation of three open-source emulators: StarryNet, OpenSN, and Celestial. Running them side-by-side and comparing them with real-world measurements from the WetLinks study identifies shortcomings of current satellite emulation techniques as well as promising avenues for research and development.