An analytical study on simulation tools and techniques in cloud computing

Abstract

Cloud computing provides convenient and on-demand access to virtually unlimited computing resources. Mobile cloud computing (MCC) is an emerging technology that integrates cloud computing technology with mobile devices. MCC provides access to cloud services for mobile devices. With the growing popularity of cloud computing, researchers in this area need to conduct real experiments in their studies. Setting up and running these experiments in real cloud environments are costly. However, modeling and simulation tools are suitable solutions that often provide good alternatives for emulating cloud computing environments. Several simulation tools have been developed especially for cloud computing. In this paper, we present the most powerful simulation tools in this research area. These include CloudSim, CloudAnalyst, CloudReports, CloudExp, GreenCloud, and iCanCloud. Also, we perform experiments for some of these tools to show their capabilities. Today, cloud computing has become a promising paradigm that aims at delivering computing resources and services on demand. The adoption of these services has been rapidly increasing. One of the main issues in this context is how to evaluate the ability of cloud systems to provide the desired services while respecting the QoS constraints. Experimentation in a real environment is a hard problem. In fact, the financial cost and the time required are very high. Also, the experiments are not repeatable, because a number of variables that are not under control of the tester may affect experimental results. Therefore, using simulation frameworks to evaluate cloud applications is preferred. This paper presents a survey of the existing simulation tools in cloud computing. It provides also a critical and comparative analysis of the studied tools. Finally, it stands out a major challenge to be addressed for further research.