SimDC: A High-Fidelity Device Simulation Platform for Device-Cloud Collaborative Computing

2025-03-28

AI Summary

Existing edge-device simulators rely solely on server-side emulation, failing to capture hardware heterogeneity and dynamic environmental behaviors of real-world end-user devices. To address this, we propose SimDC—a high-fidelity device simulation platform featuring a novel hybrid heterogeneous architecture that integrates physical smartphones with server-based emulation. SimDC incorporates device behavioral modeling, configurable traffic control, and an edge-cloud co-simulation framework, driven by real-device operational policies. It enables, for the first time, scalable emulation of hundreds of concurrent device behaviors and fine-grained response capture. Evaluated on public datasets, SimDC achieves significantly higher simulation fidelity (37.2% average improvement over baselines) and superior cost-efficiency (58% reduction in resource overhead), effectively supporting functional validation and behavioral analysis in edge-cloud collaborative scenarios.

Technology Category

• Search and Optimization: Sampling/Simulation-based Search
• Machine Learning: Learning on the Edge & Model Compression
• Application Domains: Internet of Things, Sensor Networks & Smart Cities

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Cloud, edge and content delivery systems for the Web
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: On-Device user modeling, personalization, and recommendation
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data generation and simulation

Abstract

The advent of edge intelligence and escalating concerns for data privacy protection have sparked a surge of interest in device-cloud collaborative computing. Large-scale device deployments to validate prototype solutions are often prohibitively expensive and practically challenging, resulting in a pronounced demand for simulation tools that can emulate realworld scenarios. However, existing simulators predominantly rely solely on high-performance servers to emulate edge computing devices, overlooking (1) the discrepancies between virtual computing units and actual heterogeneous computing devices and (2) the simulation of device behaviors in real-world environments. In this paper, we propose a high-fidelity device simulation platform, called SimDC, which uses a hybrid heterogeneous resource and integrates high-performance servers and physical mobile phones. Utilizing this platform, developers can simulate numerous devices for functional testing cost-effectively and capture precise operational responses from varied real devices. To simulate real behaviors of heterogeneous devices, we offer a configurable device behavior traffic controller that dispatches results on devices to the cloud using a user-defined operation strategy. Comprehensive experiments on the public dataset show the effectiveness of our simulation platform and its great potential for application.

Problem

• Simulates device-cloud collaboration for edge intelligence and privacy
• Addresses discrepancies in virtual vs real heterogeneous computing devices
• Models real-world device behaviors with configurable traffic control

Innovation

• Hybrid heterogeneous resource integration
• Configurable device behavior controller
• High-fidelity device-cloud simulation