This software provides classes and utilities for simulating orbital edge computing. The software namespace, cote, stands for "computing on the edge." A cote is a shelter for carrier pigeons.

See our Best Paper from ASPLOS'20: https://brandonlucia.com/pubs/oec-asplos2020.pdf

Current version: 1.0.0

• This software uses semantic versioning.

Dependencies

• A C++17 compiler (for std::filesystem)
• CMake for building Makefiles

sudo apt install build-essential cmake
cd $HOME/git-repos/cote/scripts
./setup_dependencies.sh $HOME/sw

Some Usage Notes

For immediate results, run the setup_dependencies.sh script and then run any example program. When running an example program, you must build the program and, depending on the example, you may need to copy the sample configuration files into the configuration folder; if so, there is a script to do this for you in the corresponding scripts directory.

There is a README file in pretty much every directory. The repository is designed to be more or less self-documenting, with any questions that may arise answered in a nearby README file or, in the case of software and scripts, in-file comments.

cote programs ingest a handful of configuration files (using the C++17 filesystem feature); the configuration files are pretty ad-hoc at the moment and could eventually be well-defined and collected into a single, well-formatted JSON file for example. For now, follow the sample configuration files located in the sample directory in the scripts folder of example programs.

Because program configurations are specified in configuration files, they can be changed without needing to recompile the programs in order to try new configurations and scenarios.

You will eventually want satellite TLEs from an up-to-date source, e.g. http://celestrak.com/NORAD/elements/. TLEs are only accurate for a few weeks (actual duration depends on the satellite), so when specifying the start date and time of a cote simulation, you should choose something close to the TLE epoch. Two scripts exist to generate these files for you: cote/scripts/generate_step_config_files.py and cote/scripts/generate_small_step_config_files.py. You should usually use generate_small_step_config_files.py unless your simulation will make large (one second or greater) time steps between iterations.

cote has been tested on Linux and macOS but not Windows; you may want to use WSL on Windows. cote is extremely reliable and well-tested but we don't have any CI so ping me if you notice some silly snag somewhere.

We have a CONTRIBUTING document but currently don't enforce it because most people just can't handle it.

• examples: Example programs
• references: Reference documents
• scripts: Useful scripts, e.g. for setting up dependencies
• software: cote classes, utilities, etc.
• README.md: This document

Written by Bradley Denby
Other contributors: None

See the top-level LICENSE file for the license.