DiaSim: A Simulator for Pervasive Computing Applications

Pervasive computing applications involve both software concerns, like any software system, and integration concerns, for the constituent net-worked devices of the pervasive computing environment. This situation is problematic for testing because it requires acquiring, testing and interfac-ing a variety of software and hardware entities. This process can rapidly become costly and time-consuming when the target environment involves many entities. This paper introduces DiaSim, a simulator for pervasive computing applications. To cope with widely heterogeneous entities, DiaSim is pa-rameterized with respect to a description of a target pervasive computing environment. This description is used to generate both a programming framework to develop the simulation logic and an emulation layer to ex-ecute applications. Furthermore, a simulation renderer is coupled to Di-aSim to allow a simulated pervasive system to be visually monitored and debugged. DiaSim has been implemented and used to simulate various perva-sive computing systems in different application areas, demonstrating the generality of our parameterized approach.