SessionSim: Activity-based session generation for network simulation

We present SessionSim, a tool for generating realistic communication sessions such as phone calls, http and email data traffic. Realistic data traffic is a crucial requirement to gauge the realism of any larger communication network simulation study. SessionSim is part of a large-scale communication network simulation environment (MIITS: Multi-scale Integrated Information and Telecommunications System), where detailed information about the individuals in a synthetic population is available, including activities (e.g., sleep, work, lunch) and locations. The key aspect of the SessionSim modeling philosophy is the insight that communication behavior heavily depends on the type of activity people are engaged in; key model parameters in addition to the nature of this dependence are inter-session times, source-destination pairs, and the actual data content that determines session size or duration. We present a mix of empirical data, earlier models and intuition for determining session parameters for phone calls, http and email and briefly discuss validation studies showing that our generated communication sessions adequately mimic real-world data. We also discuss our implementation of SessionSim in the scalable OO-simulation framework called SimCore.