Model driven generation ofmobility traces for distributed virtual environments with TRACE

摘要

Avatars' mobility is an essential element to design, validate, and compare different distributedrnvirtual environment architectures. It has a direct impact on the management of such systemsrnbecause it defines the workload associated with the areas in the virtual world. Currently, a relevantrnpart of this evaluation is conducted by means of synthetic traces generated through mobilityrnmodels. Despite that, in the last decade, several models have been proposed in literature torndescribe avatarsmobility.However, a standard methodology that drives researchers in their evaluationrndoes not yet exist. In order to alleviate this issue, we present TRACE, an open source toolrnsupporting the generation and analysis of tracesbymeansofembeddedmobility models. TRACE'srnultimate aim is to facilitate the evaluation and comparison of virtual environments and allowrnresearchers to focus on developing their solution rather than spend time to code and test customrnmobility traces. TRACE provides a unified format to describe the traces. It enables scalablernand efficient trace generation and analysis for thousands of avatars with seven built-in models.rnAlso, it defines APIs enabling the integration of additionalmodels, different configurations of thernenvironment, and several built-in metrics to analyze the generated traces.