Emulation Tool for Android Edge Devices

Abstract

The number of mobile devices has surpassed the global population, making them the primary means of communication and data sharing. However, existing applications still heavily rely on centralized networks for communicating and sharing data due to the lack of tools for developers to create and test distributed applications in edge environments. To address this issue, we present EdgeEmu, an Android-based distributed emulation tool. EdgeEmu allows a considerable number of Android emulators to participate remotely in the emulation, making it an appropriate tool for testing large networks. Unlike the standard Android SDK, EdgeEmu is not restricted to local emulators. Thus, it eliminates scalability issues present in the current Android testing infrastructure. Evaluations show that EdgeEmu outperforms the standard Android SDK by approximately 59.1% in terms of emulation startup time when ten Android emulators are used. Additionally, it exhibits low latency and negligible overhead during message exchanges between different e mulators. A d emo v ideo o f E dgeEmu i s a vailable at https://youtu.be/6jT9KXiUmQM.