Large-Scale Small Satellite Network Simulator: Design and Evaluation

Large-scale small satellite networks are playing an increasing important role in nowadays communication systems, due to its economic prospects and advantages in high bandwidth and low latency. Establishing a satellite network simulation platform for experimental verification of satellite networking and routing mechanisms can effectively reduce deployment costs. However, existing network simulators cannot support large-scale small satellite network simulations well because of the unbearable network simulation overhead or the lack of corresponding satellite simulation modules. In this paper, we introduce a lightweight, integrated large-scale small satellite network simulation platform. With a light simulation engine and abstract mode focused on the network layer, the developed simulation platform can effectively reduce the calculation overhead, increase the network simulation scale (more than 1000 satellite nodes), and finally facilitate low-cost, integrated large-scale small satellite network simulations. Through the integrating satellite orbit calculation module, we also provide a visual interface to display the real-time 2D and 3D simulation results. Furthermore, we provide integrating hierarchical cluster routing, hop-by-hop storage-and-forward, as well as reserved interfaces for future customized development. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our developed simulation platform, which can be used to evaluate the performance of large-scale small satellite network and routing mechanisms.