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.

翻译：卫星仿真软件对于开展研究至关重要，因为研究人员通常无法获取物理测试平台。为具有实用性，仿真器必须生成与真实世界观测高度一致的观测结果，且实验搭建与运行的资源开销必须在可接受范围内。本研究对StarryNet、OpenSN和Celestial三种开源仿真器进行了深入评估。通过并行运行这些仿真器，并将结果与WetLinks研究中的实际测量数据进行对比，本研究识别出当前卫星仿真技术的不足以及具有前景的研究与发展方向。