Telecom satellite simulation.

Context

Built in Unreal Engine as a real-time visualisation of a telecom satellite constellation. The goal: turn the abstract dance of orbits, ground stations, and signal hand-offs into something you can watch happen.

What it simulates

▸ Orbital mechanics

Satellites follow Keplerian orbits derived from real-world TLE-style parameters, propagated each frame.

▸ Coverage & link budget

Each satellite projects its footprint onto the Earth; ground stations connect to whichever bird is currently overhead, with the link state visualised as it makes and breaks.

Handcrafted algorithms

Two pieces of telecom logic are bespoke to this simulation rather than pulled from a library — they're where the engineering work actually lives.

▸ Handover

As satellites drift out of a ground station's cone, traffic has to be passed to the next bird overhead without dropping the link. The handover algorithm weighs each candidate by elevation, remaining dwell time and current load, then picks the transition window that minimises disruption. The animation makes the timing of these switches tangible — you see the link colour change frame-by-frame as the decision is made.

▸ Total potential capacity

A second algorithm computes the constellation's total potential capacity — the upper bound of throughput you could squeeze out of the configuration if every satellite was paired with the best-possible ground station at every instant. It folds together footprint overlap, link-budget bands and an LP-style assignment over the contact graph, and it surfaces the number that actually matters for sizing a network.

Built on

Orbit propagation runs on dnwrnr/sgp4 — a C++ implementation of the SGP4/SDP4 models that turn two-line element sets into per-frame satellite positions.

Status

Under construction — write-up, screenshots and a flythrough clip to come.