Simonstrator: simulation and prototyping platform for distributed mobile applications

The increasing market penetration of mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, poses additional challenges on the design of distributed systems. Due to the heterogeneous environment consisting of both, mobile and fixed devices, a multitude of effects on different scales need to be considered. Microscopic effects, such as an individual user's interaction with the device, as well as macroscopic effects, such as scalability with the number of users have an impact on the system's performance. The combined evaluation of micro- and macroscopic effects requires both, simulations and prototypical deployments. Furthermore, insights obtained through prototypes during user studies can lead to refined protocols and algorithms, thereby contributing to the overall design process. To enable parallel assessment of micro- and macroscopic effects, we propose the Simonstrator platform, consisting of a lightweight framework for the development and instrumentation of distributed systems as well as runtime environments for (i) the interaction with common simulators, (ii) the deployment on testbeds, and (iii) Android devices. The platform is specifically targeted towards distributed systems for heterogeneous scenarios, considering mobile and fixed networks. We show sample simulations and prototypical deployments of two exemplary use cases: a live video streaming system and a middleware for augmented reality games, highlighting different evaluation goals and environments supported by the proposed Simonstrator platform.