Contribution to the integration of network simulators and social simulation environments for the modelling of environments and smart devices

Resumo

This PhD Thesis work is developed in the areas of advanced communications, information technology and public safety by the NIST and is also embraced in the information society, a science area defined by the European Commission. The idea was conceived due to the lack of AmI environment simulators that consider both, the people that traverse these environments and the devices existing in them. On the one hand, current existing social simulators such as MASON, Repast or Swarm are focused on the people that interact in these environments but are not able to do an in-depth simulation of the devices and their communications. On the other hand, current existing network simulators such as ns-3, OMNet++ or NetSim are focused in simulating the devices in AmI environments and the communications among them but are not able to do an exhaustive simulation of people and their behavior. In order to solve this problem, I propose in this work an AmI co-simulator called Hydra, that integrates MASON (a social simulator) and ns-3 (a network simulator). My proposal includes the necessary coordination mechanisms to make the whole simulation work, and all the modules necessary to perform the AmI simulation. Additionally, I propose a global data model, that integrates the objects from the social environment and the network environment; a sequence model able to integrate both simulations and a time model to calculate the limitations of the simulation. Based on the features required in a network simulator, a social simulator and additional ones identified in an AmI simulator, I proposed a methodology for the design of AmI simulators. I used that methodology to define the Hydra simulator. Hydra was integrated in a real AmI environment obtaining the data from the sensors and actuators in the environment rather than generating them in the simulator. This integration enables the prediction of possible future events in the environment that could be prevented or at least minimize its effects. Hydra was also integrated with a semantic platform using a prosumer framework for easy service creation by end users with no experience creating and deploying services over a semantic AmI platform. This framework facilitates the extraction of the data provided by the semantic platform, the execution of the simulations and the improvement of the user experience. In order to validate the proposal, several experimentations, surveys and simulations were carried out. The results from the validation concluded that: a more complete simulation of AmI environments can be obtained using Hydra than executing a social simulator and a network simulator separately, a methodology will help in the creation of co-simulators for AmI environments, future events can be predicted in an AmI environment using Hydra and prosumerization helps improving user experience. In this work I proposed the integration of ns-3 (a network simulator) and MASON (a social simulator) to create a system I have called Hydra and is based on a proposed methodology that coordinates both simulators. Data, sequence and time models were proposed to define Hydra and it was integrated in an AmI environment for the prediction of events and it was also integrated with a prosumer framework to facilitate its use. All this work was validated with positive results.