NetSkylines: Digital Twins for Evaluating Disaster Communication

Thoroughly evaluating new communication mechanisms for emergency communication is a necessity prior to deployment. This evaluation is often heavily dependent on specialized movement patterns, ranging from purely random over highly scenario specific to real-world traces. The latter being usually the most realistic, but also hard to realize for many different scenarios. Furthermore, the generation of the movement patterns and integration in a network simulation is often a nontrivial task for experts, involving various specialized tools. Thus, professional responders, that quickly want to model a scenario relevant for them and afterwards evaluate technical solutions in this setting, will fail. In this paper, we present a novel framework to utilize an accessible city building game to build a digital twin and generate movement traces in large scale. This can be used to easily model different scenarios, what-if analyses, and also simulate different disasters. Moreover, we provide tools and easy integration of these traces into various network simulators and emulation environments. Therefore, evaluation of disruption-tolerant networking protocols or mesh setups becomes much easier.