Participatory Mobile Social Network Simulation Environment

In Mobile Social Networks(MSN) individuals with similar interests or commonalities, connect to each other using the mobile phones. Validation of protocols for these networks relies almost exclusively on simulations. Thus a simulation using a mobility model that captures the behavior of nodes in the real world is needed. The current simulations techniques use random models to generate dynamic MSN. However, the random models are not suitable for MSN simulations. In this paper we use Second Life(SL)1 as a simulation environment, which can support dynamics in simulation models by allowing real users to participate using their avatars. SL is a virtual world simulator accessible via the Internet having more than five hundred thousand active users. SL can capture dynamics of movement models as avatars have different movement speed, different movement patterns and different neighbors. Therefore, in this paper we propose the Virtual Social Simulated Environment (VSSE). VSSE consists of basic simulation using SL Bots (computer controlled SL agents) and protocols to allow avatars to participate in the simulation. Thus making it a participatory MSN simulation environment. We present the design of our state-driven grid region, a prototype implementation based on the daily mobility patterns and compare our system with a similar real-world experiment. To the best of our knowledge this is the first time that a participatory MSN simulations environment has been proposed, which allows anyone, including non-experts, to experiment and experience the technology. Moreover, this approach allows to validate protocols by providing a close to real life simulation environment for researchers.