MegaDroid project is a virtual town with 300,000 Android smartphones

What do you do with a town full of 300,000 Android smartphones? You run all sorts of tests, of course. But since not everyone would be willing to become a guinea-pig for a scientific experiment, researchers at the U.S. government’s Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, California, are using an array of virtual smartphones through a datacenter with 500 cheap desktop computers.

This setup emulates a network of 300,000 Android smartphones, which includes exchange of SMS messages, wireless data, and an array of phone sensor and radio activity.

The main aim here is to study the interactions across different devices, which will eventually have a handful of practical applications. For instance, the team intends to use their findings to help developers that build social and location-based apps (such as Foursquare), those that build disaster-mitigation apps, and even developers planning to build mesh-type networks for emergency use.

Researcher are also looking into the possibility of Android smartphones running distributed applications over such a mesh network. This way, the phones need not rely on a central network, or even a WiFi network, in order to communicate with each other.

Apart from innovative ways for smartphones to communicate with each other, the research will also look into possible “attack vectors,” through which malicious hackers or malware can break into networks and Android smartphones. This is an important consideration today, given smartphone malware is on the rise today, especially within the Android ecosystem.

The researchers are planning to extend the experiment to other platforms such as Apple’s iOS, although Android is the ideal one at this point, given its more open nature.

Source : androidauthority