Model driven generation of mobility traces for distributed virtual environments with TRACE

Avatars' mobility is an essential element to design, validate, and compare different distributed virtual environment architectures. It has a direct impact on the management of such systems because it defines the workload associated with the areas in the virtual world. Currently, a relevant part of this evaluation is conducted by means of synthetic traces generated through mobility models. Despite that, in the last decade, several models have been proposed in literature to describe avatars mobility. However, a standard methodology that drives researchers in their evaluation does not yet exist. In order to alleviate this issue, we present TRACE, an open source tool supporting the generation and analysis of traces by means of embedded mobility models. TRACE's ultimate aim is to facilitate the evaluation and comparison of virtual environments and allow researchers to focus on developing their solution rather than spend time to code and test custom mobility traces. TRACE provides a unified format to describe the traces. It enables scalable and efficient trace generation and analysis for thousands of avatars with seven built-in models. Also, it defines APIs enabling the integration of additional models, different configurations of the environment, and several built-in metrics to analyze the generated traces.