About

Celestial is an emulator for the LEO edge. It supports satellite servers as well as ground stations. Each node is booted as a microVM. Celestial scales across as many hosts as you want.

At any given time, only a subset of given satellite servers are booted, dependent on your configured bounding box.

Celestial…

…creates Firecracker microVMs with your custom kernel and filesystem
…modifies network connections for a realistic network condition
…lets you define a bounding box on earth, so you only need to emulate satellites that you’re actually interested in
…creates/suspends microVMs as they move in to/out of your bounding box
…has APIs for your satellites to retrieve some meta-information

Check out celestial-videoconferencing-evaluation for an example application on Celestial! Also check out the celestial-buoy-evaluation and the celestial-twissandra-evaluation.

A word of caution: you can technically run the server-side software on any computer you want, but it requires root access to fiddle with your network settings. Therefore, we highly encourage you to only run it on dedicated servers. It’s doing its best to clean up everything, but it has to make changes to a lot of networking settings, so we can’t guarantee that it doesn’t destroy any of your other stuff.

Research

If you use this software in a publication, please cite it as:

T. Pfandzelter and D. Bermbach, Celestial: Virtual Software System Testbeds for the LEO Edge, 23rd ACM/IFIP International Middleware Conference (Middleware ‘22), Quebec City, Canada, 2022, doi: 10.1145/3528535.3531517.

@inproceedings{pfandzelter2022celestial,
    author = "Pfandzelter, Tobias and Bermbach, David",
    title = "Celestial: Virtual Software System Testbeds for the LEO Edge",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 23rd ACM/IFIP International Middleware Conference",
    pages = "69--81",
    month = nov,
    year = 2022,
    publisher = "Association for Computing Machinery",
    address = "New York, NY, USA",
    series = "Middleware '22",
    location = "Quebec, QC, Canada",
    url = "https://doi.org/10.1145/3528535.3531517",
    doi = "10.1145/3528535.3531517"
}

A full list of our publications and prototypes is available on our group website.

License

The code in this repository is licensed under the terms of the GPLv3 license.

Documentation

The complete documentation can be found at openfogstack.github.io/celestial or in the docs directory.