Scalable Context Simulation for Mobile Applications

Mobility, and, implicitly, context-awareness, offer significant opportunities to service providers to augment and differentiate their respective services. Though this potential has been long acknowledged, the dynamic nature of a mobile user’s context can lead to various difficulties when engineering mobile, context-aware applications. Classic software engineering elements are well understood in the fixed computing domain. However, the mobile domain introduces further degrees of difficulty into the process. The testing phase of the software engineering cycle is a particular case in point as modelling the myriad of scenarios that mobile users may find themselves is practically impossible. In this paper, we describe a scalable framework that can be used both for initial prototyping and for the final testing of mobile context-aware applications. In particular, we focus on scenarios where the application is in essence a distributed multi-agent system, comprising a suite of agents running on both mobile devices and on fixed nodes on a wireless network.