PFogSim: A Simulator for Evaluating Dynamic and Layered Fog Computing Environments

Abstract

The first phase of 5G specification, Release-15, will be completed by April 2019, and our world will truly enter the 5G era. With the advent of 5G, the data transmission cost is expected to reduce significantly. Thus, it will support Edge Computing and Fog Computing feasibility in the future.

To evaluate the cost of the new computing configuration, a new simulator called PFogSim was proposed in "PFogSim: A Simulator for Performance Evaluation of Mobile and Hierarchical Fog Computing Environments" [Shehenaz 2019]. As a participant of the PFogSim project, the PFogSim simulator will be discussed in this work. Compared to other simulators which support only a limited number of fog nodes, PFogSim not only supports simulation of a large-scale multi-layered fog design but also supports different orchestrators. It reports the simulation results with metrics. Users can test and evaluate their proposed fog architecture using these metrics accurately and efficiently. Besides, built-in orchestrators, PFogSim supports users to load customized orchestrators and verify their own fog architecture.

To test the simulator, we ran several simulations with different numbers of mobile devices ranging from 500 to 5,000. The test results show that our simulator can provide various feedback information metrics to the user. By using this information, we use several MATLAB scripts to generate result graphs which help users evaluate their fog computing environment effectively and conveniently.