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.
@article{arxiv.2604.04498,
title = {An experimental evaluation of satellite constellation emulators},
author = {Victor Cionca and Ferenc Szabo and Stanimir Vasilev and Dylan Smyth},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.04498},
year = {2026}
}