Renovation of EdgeCloudSim: An Efficient Discrete-Event Approach

TL;DR

This paper improves EdgeCloudSim by fixing its data structures and event management, resulting in significantly faster simulation speeds and better scalability for complex edge-cloud environments.

Contribution

It introduces an enhanced version of EdgeCloudSim that addresses efficiency and scalability issues through optimized data structures and event handling strategies.

Findings

Achieves 100x speedup in simulation runtime

Maintains simulation expressiveness and accuracy

Enhances scalability for large device counts

Abstract

Due to the growing popularity of the Internet of Things, edge computing concept has been widely studied to relieve the load on the original cloud and networks while improving the service quality for end-users. To simulate such a complex environment involving edge and cloud computing, EdgeCloudSim has been widely adopted. However, it suffers from certain efficiency and scalability issues due to the ignorance of the deficiency in the originally adopted data structures and maintenance strategies. Specifically, it generates all events at beginning of the simulation and stores unnecessary historical information, both result in unnecessarily high complexity for search operations. In this work, by fixing the mismatches on the concept of discrete-event simulation, we propose enhancement of EdgeCloudSim which improves not only the runtime efficiency of simulation, but also the flexibility and scalability. Through extensive experiments with statistical methods, we show that the enhancement does not affect the expressiveness of simulations while obtaining 2 orders of magnitude speedup, especially when the device count is large.