EdgeEmu - Emulator for Android Edge Devices

The number of mobile devices is rapidly outgrowing the current world population, making them the most popular medium to communicate and share information. In addition, applications that enable communication and data sharing still heavily rely on centralized networks. We believe that this problem is mainly due to the lack of tools to help programmers develop and test applications with many devices in edge environments. To help programmers develop and test such distributed applications, we propose EdgeEmu, an Android distributed emulation testbed for mobile applications. EdgeEmu supports a high number of Android emulators participating in a large network by allowing them to remotely participate in the emulation, thus removing the scalability bottleneck that current Android testing infrastructure has. EdgeEmu is, therefore, not limited to locally deployed emulators as opposed to the standard Android SDK. To study the performance of EdgeEmu, extensive evaluation through different scenarios has been conducted. Results demonstrate that EdgeEmu outperforms the standard Android SDK by approximately 59.1% in terms of emulation startup time when ten Android emulators are used. Evaluations also show promising results for low latency and negligible overhead when sending messages to and from different emulators.