Model driven generation of mobility traces for distributed virtual environments with TRACE. (28th July 2017)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Carlini, Emanuele; Lulli, Alessandro; Ricci, Laura
• Other Names: Ricci Laura guestEditor.; Iosup Alexandru guestEditor.; Prodan Radu guestEditor.; Dong Fang guestEditor.; Shen Jun guestEditor.; He Qiang guestEditor.
• Is Part Of: Concurrency and computation. Volume 30:Number 20(2018)
• Page Start: n/a
• Page End: n/a
• Publication Date: 2017-07-28
• Subjects: distributed virtual environment -- mobility model -- multiplayer games -- open source; Parallel processing (Electronic computers) -- Periodicals; Parallel computers -- Periodicals; 004.35
• DOI: 10.1002/cpe.4235
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1532-0626

Abstract

Summary: Avatars' mobility is an essential element to design, validate, and compare different distributed virtual environment architectures. It has a direct impact on the management of such systems because it defines the workload associated with the areas in the virtual world. Currently, a relevant part of this evaluation is conducted by means of synthetic traces generated through mobility models. Despite that, in the last decade, several models have been proposed in literature to describe avatars mobility. However, a standard methodology that drives researchers in their evaluation does not yet exist. In order to alleviate this issue, we presentTRACE, an open source tool supporting the generation and analysis of traces by means of embedded mobility models.TRACE 's ultimate aim is to facilitate the evaluation and comparison of virtual environments and allow researchers to focus on developing their solution rather than spend time to code and test custom mobility traces.TRACE provides a unified format to describe the traces. It enables scalable and efficient trace generation and analysis for thousands of avatars with seven built‐in models. Also, it defines APIs enabling the integration of additional models, different configurations of the environment, and several built‐in metrics to analyze the generated traces.