Simulation Tools for Fog Computing: A Comparative Analysis

With the increasing demand for mobile and high-performance IoT applications, cloud computing has shown its weaknesses in providing predictable and low end-to-end communication latency. To overcome the limitations of cloud computing a new paradigm known as Fog Computing was introduced, which offers resources closer to the proximity of the users. Researchers propose different solutions to make Fog Computing mature. These solutions need to be evaluated in order to see their efficiency and applicability. However, the real application cases of Fog Computing are very complex, and a failure in applying the new research in a real environment may degrade the performance of Fog Computing. Therefore, it is necessary to test the solutions in a controlled environment before applying them to real environments. Therefore, simulation is one of the best options to be considered for evaluating the new solutions. In this paper, we compare different Fog Computing simulators based on their technical and non-technical characteristics. In addition, a practical comparison has also been conducted to compare the three main simulators based on their performance such as execution time, CPU, and memory usage for running different applications such as eHealth, video surveillance, and latency-sensitive game. The purpose of this survey is to demonstrate the technical and non-technical differences along with the suitability of simulators according to the use cases.