FogNetSim++: A Toolkit for Modeling and Simulation of Distributed Fog Environment

Abstract

Fog computing is a technology that brings computing and storage resources near to the end user. Being in its infancy, fog computing lacks standardization in terms of architectures and simulation platforms. There are a number of fog simulators available today, among which a few are open-source, whereas rest are commercially available. The existing fog simulators mainly focus on a number of devices that can be simulated. Generally, the existing simulators are more inclined toward sensors' configurations, where sensors generate raw data and fog nodes are used to intelligently process the data before sending to back-end cloud or other nodes. Therefore, these simulators lack network properties and assume reliable and error-free delivery on every service request. Moreover, no simulator allows researchers to incorporate their own fog nodes management algorithms, such as scheduling. In existing work, device handover is also not supported. In this paper, we propose a new fog simulator called FogNetSim++1 that provides users with detailed configuration options to simulate a large fog network. It enables researchers to incorporate customized mobility models and fog node scheduling algorithms, and manage handover mechanisms. In our evaluation setup, a traffic management system is evaluated to demonstrate the scalability and effectiveness of proposed simulator in terms of CPU and memory usage. We have also benchmarked the network parameters, such as execution delay, packet error rate, handovers, and latency.

Keywords

• Cloud
• fog
• edge network
• IoT
• mobility models
• OMNeT++