A Generic Large Scale Simulator for Ubiquitous Computing

Abstract

The complexity associated to gathering and processing contextual data makes testing mobile context-aware applications and services difficult. Furthermore, the lack of standard data sets and simulation tools makes the evaluation of machine learning algorithms in context-aware settings an even harder task. To ease the situation, we introduce a generic simulator that has been designed with the above mentioned purposes in mind. The simulator has also proven to be a good demonstration tool for mobile services and applications that are aimed at groups. The simulator is highly customizable and it can output context information of individual entities both through an interactive GUI and as data streams consisting of comma separated values. To support a wide range of tasks and scenarios, we have separated the three main information sources: behavior of agents, the scenario being simulated and the used context variable. The simulator has been implemented using Java, and the data streams have been made available through a Web service interface