Similitude: Interfacing a Traffic Simulator and Network Simulator with Emulated Android Clients

Abstract

Mobile phone apps are increasingly part and parcel of today's intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Evaluating these apps at scale requires modeling of phones and networks, along with vehicles, people and roads. In this paper, we present Similitude, a system comprising a traffic simulator, network simulator, and cluster of Android emulators that has applications in mobile app development as well as modern transport simulation. Apps with their wireless network stack are run on an Android emulator, with network packet delivery modeled in detail via a network simulator. Each phone's location and human interaction elements are obtained through interfacing with a microscopic traffic simulator running driver and pedestrian behavioral models. A prototype of the system is shown to scale well up to 300 simultaneous connected Android emulators, with individual system components scaling upwards of thousands of agents. An ITS app that does road space rationing is used as the case study demonstrating a potential use case of Similitude.