Distributed emulation for the design of active tag based systems

Several choices have to be made during the design process of active tag based systems. Since the number of properties that must be decided before production and wide-scale deployment is relatively high, the use of real experiments in the design phase may be prohibitive. We propose the use of emulation for performing large-scale experiments with active tag based systems easily and in a repeatable manner. Such experiments can be used to validate the behavior of the system, and to decide the values for various system parameters. We illustrate this approach by experimental results obtained with an emulation framework that we designed and implemented for a pedestrian localization active tag based system.