OS³, the Open Source Satellite Simulator, was developed as a framework for simulating various kinds of satellite-based communication, based on OMNeT++. The aim was to create a platform that makes evaluating satellite communication protocols as easy as possible. OS³ is also be able to automatically import real satellite tracks and weather data to simulate conditions at a certain point in the past or in the future, and offer powerful visualization.

OS³ enables a comfortable and thorough analysis of complex scenarios which may be infeasible to test in reality. Starting anywhere from calculating attenuation losses for earth-bound receivers up to complex mobility scenarios, the variety of topics is only limited by creativity. For example, users are able to test new protocols or satellite orbits and evaluate the resulting performance pertaining to SNR, bit error rate, packet loss, round trip time, jitter, reachability, and other measures.

OS³ was developed at the Communication Networks Institute, TU Dortmund, Germany.