Atheer System: Simulation Evaluation Artifact for Offline-First Mobile Payments

This repository serves as the reproducibility artifact for the simulation-based evaluation of the "Atheer" system, as detailed in Section VII of the research paper submitted to DTISD 2026.

📝 System Overview

This project enables researchers and developers to reproduce and validate published results, ensuring scientific transparency and reliability. The system performs a comprehensive simulation of a 4-layer End-to-End (E2E) model:

Layer	Functional Description
Edge Layer (SDK)	Simulates NFC interaction and Host Card Emulation (HCE) for local cryptographic token generation.
Network Layer (Transport)	Models data transmission via Public Internet (S1) or Private APN (S2), accounting for packet loss and latency.
Processing Layer (Atheer Switch)	Simulates the gateway switch using Redis (idempotency) and PostgreSQL (storage) micro-latencies.
Integration Layer (Core Bank)	Models the connection to core banking ledgers through secure API adapters.

📊 Reproducible Results

This codebase allows for the regeneration of the following figures and tables presented in the research paper:

• Figure 6 (Fig. 6): Transaction Success Rate vs. Network Load (Mean ± 95% CI).
• Figure 7 (Fig. 7): P95 End-to-End (E2E) Latency under varying traffic loads.
• Table IV: Aggregated Performance Summary (Mean ± 95% CI).
• Table V: Failure Breakdown Analysis at peak load (500 TPS).

Technical Note: Simulation parameters are defined in configs/paper.yml (the source of truth) and loaded dynamically by atheer_sim.py at runtime. Any parameter changes should be made in configs/paper.yml.

📂 Repository Layout

• atheer_sim.py: Main Discrete-Event Simulation (DES) engine built with SimPy.
• requirements.txt: List of required Python dependencies.
• tools/build_paper_tables.py: Helper tool to generate formatted tables from raw simulation data.
• configs/paper.yml: Configuration file containing the specific parameters used in the paper's scenarios.
• docs/: Additional documentation including model assumptions and parameter definitions.

⚙️ Requirements

• Language: Python 3.10 or higher.
• Core Dependencies:
  • simpy >= 4.1 (Event simulation management)
  • numpy, pandas (Data processing and analysis)
  • matplotlib (Scientific data visualization)

🚀 Quick Start

To reproduce the research results, follow these steps:

1. Environment Setup:

   python -m venv .venv
   source .venv/bin/activate  # For Linux/macOS
   # .venv\Scripts\activate  # For Windows
   pip install -r requirements.txt

2. Execute Simulation:

   python atheer_sim.py

📈 Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

• Switch Overhead: Validates that the internal processing time within the Atheer Switch remains below 20ms.
• End-to-End (E2E) Latency: Measures the total time from NFC tap to merchant confirmation.
• Success Rate: The percentage of transactions successfully completed within the defined timeout period.

📚 Citation

If you utilize this work in your research, please use the following citation:

@software{al_mutawakel_2026_19383901,
  author       = {Al-Mutawakel, Ahmed Ali Mohammed Hasan},
  title        = {Atheer Simulation Evaluation Artifact},
  year         = 2026,
  version      = {v1.2.0},
  doi          = {10.5281/zenodo.19616158},
  url          = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19616158}
}

⚖️ License & Contact

• License: MIT License.
• Contact: Please refer to the author's email provided in the research paper or open an Issue in this repository.