Abstract
It is expected that the pervasive deployment of multi-tier 5G-supported Mobile-Fog-Cloudtechnological computing platforms will constitute an effective means to support the real-time execution of future Internet applications by resource- and energy-limited mobile devices. Increasing interest in this emerging networking-computing technology demands the optimization and performance evaluation of several parts of the underlying infrastructures. However, field trials are challenging due to their operational costs, and in every case, the obtained results could be difficult to repeat and customize. These emerging Mobile-Fog-Cloud ecosystems still lack, indeed, customizable software tools for the performance simulation of their computing-networking building blocks. Motivated by these considerations, in this contribution, we present VirtFogSim. It is a MATLAB-supported software toolbox that allows the dynamic joint optimization and tracking of the energy and delay performance of Mobile-Fog-Cloud systems for the execution of applications described by general Directed Application Graphs (DAGs). In a nutshell, the main peculiar features of the proposed VirtFogSim toolbox are that: (i) it allows the joint dynamic energy-aware optimization of the placement of the application tasks and the allocation of the needed computing-networking resources under hard constraints on acceptable overall execution times; (ii) it allows the repeatable and customizable simulation of the resulting energy-delay performance of the overall system; (iii) it allows the dynamic tracking of the performed resource allocation under time-varying operational environments, as those typically featuring mobile applications; (iv) it is equipped with a user-friendly Graphic User Interface (GUI) that supports a number of graphic formats for data rendering; and (v) its MATLAB code is optimized for running atop multi-core parallel execution platforms. To check both the actual optimization and scalability capabilities of the VirtFogSim toolbox, a number of experimental setups featuring different use cases and operational environments are simulated, and their performances are compared.
Highlights
Modern mobile devices are equipped with a number of both heterogeneous Network InterfaceCards (NICs) and multimedia sensors that allow them to host emerging perception-related applications, such as face/gesture detection/classification, visual text translation, fusion of sensed data, and video image processing, just to cite a few
The main peculiar features of the proposed VirtFogSim toolbox are that: (i) it allows the joint dynamic energy-aware optimization of the placement of the application tasks and the allocation of the needed computing-networking resources under hard constraints on acceptable overall execution times; (ii) it allows the repeatable and customizable simulation of the resulting energy-delay performance of the overall system; (iii) it allows the dynamic tracking of the performed resource allocation under time-varying operational environments, as those typically featuring mobile applications; (iv) it is equipped with a user-friendly Graphic User Interface (GUI) that supports a number of graphic formats for data rendering; and (v) its MATLAB code is optimized for running atop multi-core parallel execution platforms
The VirtFogSim toolbox relies on a gradient-based primal-dual iterative procedure that implements a set of ad-hoc designed adaptive step-sizes: The goal is to speed up the convergence to the corresponding steady-states of the per-core computing frequencies and per-connection bandwidths to be dynamically allocated; it allows the user to test the energy-delay performances of six different task allocation strategies, namely the Genetic, Only-Mobile, Only-Fog, Only-Cloud, Only-Task Allocation, and Exhaustive-Search strategies, and to add new user-defined strategies; the code of the core engine of the simulator leverages the Parallel Toolbox of MATLAB, in order to exploit automatically the multi-core capability possibly retained by the execution environment of the simulator
Summary
Modern mobile devices are equipped with a number of both heterogeneous Network Interface. A more appealing approach could be, to allow mobile devices to exploit both the simultaneous utilization of the hosted NICs and the sub-millisecond network latencies featuring the forthcoming Fifth-Generation (5G) communication technology, in order to distribute task offloading suitably to both the remote Cloud and nearby small-sized virtualized data centers, generally referred to as Fog nodes [2]. The pivotal idea is to take full advantage of the cooperative radio resource management and distributed computing capability at nearby Fog nodes, in order to: (i) shorten the communication latencies for the execution of delay-sensitive light tasks; and (ii) resort to centralized remote cloud data centers only for the execution of delay-tolerant workload-intensive tasks
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