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Constellation Visualizations

LEOPath includes a static Cesium viewer for the constellation designs used in the routing evaluation.

The viewer runs fully in the browser. It loads the simulator-generated TLE files, propagates satellite positions with satellite.js, and renders the constellation in CesiumJS.

Open Viewer

Open the standalone viewer:

Open Cesium constellation viewer

Included Constellations

  • Starlink-550: 22 orbital planes, 72 satellites per plane.
  • Kuiper-synthetic: 34 orbital planes, 34 satellites per plane.
  • OneWeb-synthetic: 18 orbital planes, 36 satellites per plane.
  • Telesat-synthetic: 27 orbital planes, 13 satellites per plane.
  • Dense-LEO-synthetic: 72 orbital planes, 72 satellites per plane.

Controls

  • Select a constellation from the drop-down menu.
  • Select the ISL topology: Ring draws intra-plane links, while +Grid draws both intra-plane and inter-plane links.
  • Toggle ground-station markers, nearest-visible GSL attachments, and all-satellite rendering for sampled dense views.
  • Use the clock-speed slider or Cesium timeline to inspect orbital motion.

Route Overlay

Pick a source and destination ground station to draw a route between them:

  • Topological forwarding (yellow) forwards greedily on the satellites' orbital coordinates, the same policy evaluated in the paper.
  • Shortest-path route (link-state) (green, optional checkbox) is Dijkstra over the inter-satellite-link graph weighted by physical distance.

A ground station is reachable through any satellite currently overhead, so delivery happens at the first such satellite (multi-homing). When the two lines coincide, topological forwarding is taking a shortest path; the green line is drawn slightly wider so it shows as a rim around the yellow one.

Reachability depends on the ISL topology. With Ring (intra-plane links only), two ground stations connect only when an orbital plane currently passes over both; otherwise the panel reports the route as unreachable — try +Grid. With +Grid (inter-plane links added) the network is connected, so routes are essentially always available and topological forwarding ties the shortest path.

Path quality (how close topological is to shortest-path) and reachability (whether a path exists at all) are separate. The reported path stretch is measured only over reachable pairs; Ring gaps are a coverage limitation, not a stretch result.

Route lines are clipped at the Earth's limb, so the half on the far side is hidden behind the globe rather than drawn through it.

Local Build

Build the docs plus Cesium assets:

bash bash scripts/build-docs-site.sh

Serve the generated site locally:

bash python -m http.server -d site

Then open http://localhost:8000/cesium/.