EdgeCloudSim: An environment for performance evaluation of Edge Computing systems

Edge Computing is a fast growing field of research covering a spectrum of technologies such as Cloudlets, Fog Computing and Mobile Edge Computing (MEC). Edge Computing involves technically more sophisticated setup when compared with the pure Cloud Computing and pure Mobile Computing cases since both computational and network resources should be considered simultaneously. In that respect, it provides a larger design space with many parameters rendering a variety of novel approaches feasible. Given the complexity, Edge Computing designs deserve scientific scrutiny for sound assessment of their feasibility. However, despite increasing research activity, this field lacks a simulation tool compatible with the requirements. Starting from available simulators a significant programming effort is required to obtain a simulation tool meeting the actual needs. To decrease the barriers, a new simulator tool called EdgeCloudSim streamlined for Edge Computing scenarios is proposed in this work. EdgeCloudSim builds upon CloudSim to address the specific demands of Edge Computing research and support necessary functionality in terms of computation and networking abilities. To demonstrate the capabilities of EdgeCloudSim an experiment setup based on different edge architectures is simulated and the effect of the computational and networking system parameters on the results are depicted.