Stardust: A Scalable and Extensible Simulator for the 3D Continuum (2506.01513v1)

Abstract: Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellations are quickly being recognized as an upcoming extension of the Edge-Cloud Continuum into a 3D Continuum. Low-latency connectivity around the Earth and increasing computational power with every new satellite generation lead to a vision of workflows being seamlessly executed across Edge, Cloud, and space nodes. High launch costs for new satellites and the need to experiment with large constellations mandate the use of simulators for validating new orchestration algorithms. Unfortunately, existing simulators only allow for relatively small constellations to be simulated without scaling to a large number of host machines. In this paper, we present Stardust, a scalable and extensible simulator for the 3D Continuum. Stardust supports i) simulating mega constellations with 3x the size of the currently largest LEO mega constellation on a single machine, ii) experimentation with custom network routing protocols through its dynamic routing mechanism, and iii) rapid testing of orchestration algorithms or software by integrating them into the simulation as SimPlugins. We evaluate Stardust in multiple simulations to show that it is more scalable than the state-of-the-art and that it can simulate a mega constellation with up to 20.6k satellites on a single machine.