A discrete-event simulator for the web of things from an information retrieval perspective

Simulators are an essential tool for researching and developing new systems, architectures or protocols. They have played a key role in the history of the Internet and the Web. This paper highlights the view that the simulation-based research will continue to take part in the evolution of paradigms associated with the Internet and the Web of Things. In this work, we present a simulator whose ultimate goal is to encapsulate the model and the expected dynamics of the Web of Things, for the development of Information Retrieval systems given the new evolutionary challenges to face. The simulation model is based on the automatic generation of a collection of XML documents, which contain spatio-temporal contexts and extensive textual information with highly dynamic dimensions. The simulator is characterized among other proposals for its flexibility and versatility to represent different real-world scenarios, constructed from entities with generic qualities and a unique perspective from information retrieval.