Frequently Asked Questions

How can I get help?

You can write to paolieri@usc.edu or create an issue ticket on the issue tracker of VCE.

How should I prepare my multi-satellite application for VCE?

For each node in the constellation (satellites and base stations), VCE needs a valid Amazon machine image (AMI) and a command to start the part of the application that should run on that node.

A simple approach is the following:

• Start a VM on AWS with an Amazon Linux image in your region.
• Install and test the software necessary for all nodes.
• Create your own AMI.

Then, you can use the ID of your own AMI and specify different commands (cmd) for the different nodes of the constellation in the VCE configuration.

How can I see the output of my program after the simulation?

Before deleting the AWS stack, you can SSH into the VM of any node and check the output of your program inside the file cmd.out.

How can I see the recorded metrics?

You can create an SSH tunnel from your computer to the VCE server running on AWS:

$ ssh -i ~/.ssh/paolieri.pem -NL 3000:localhost:3000 centos@54.242.51.197

You can now access Grafana (running on the VCE server in AWS) from your computer by opening http://localhost:3000.