Add Support for State Heterogeneity [FR] about plato HOT 5 CLOSED

This is perhaps best implemented as an optional addition to the simulation mode, which is already supported in Plato and as you correctly pointed out, it should be relatively straightforward. Also, I don't really think one should start from something as sophisticated as playing back a trace -- For almost 100% of the research projects, using a simple random process to characterize client availability is good enough. After all, even if a trace can be replayed, such traces are hardly available from actual real-world environments.

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It looks like the FedScale git repo contains a raw 24.5 MB trace in binary format for the so-called 'device_info' -- FedScale/dataset/data/device_info/. It should be fairly straightforward to transfer the trace into more readable JSON formats for better parsing.

Using JSON is perhaps a better choice than a proprietary format (such as '[client_id]: [starting status], [transition time (in seconds) t1, t2, ...] e.g., 1: on, [54, 890, 2042, ...]'), since it can be easily parsed using standard off-the-shelf parsers.

Reading from actual traces, however, should still come as a next feature after the use of simple random processes can be implemented, which is much more reproducible and adjustable (in terms of parameter settings) despite the fact that they are synthetic.

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I see. We are then going to start with random processes in the simulation mode. The reproducibility may be guaranteed by using consistent seeds for any random number generator.

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Yes, reproducibility is indeed guaranteed with a pre-specified random seed (which is already a configuration parameter).

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Closed due to low priority.

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