Flexcomm Simulator: Exploring Energy Flexibility in Software Defined Networks with ns-3

The digitalization of energy generation and distribution systems opens new opportunities for devising network operation and traffic engineering strategies capable of adapting to the energy availability and sources. Despite the potential, developing and testing new approaches are challenging in production environments. Furthermore, no simulators support such integration between the communication infrastructure and the power grid. Thus, this paper introduces Flexcomm Simulator, a tool based on ns-3 that supports developing and assessing multiple strategies toward green networking and communications driven by real-time information from the power grid (i.e., Energy Flexibility). The proof-of-concept results demonstrate this contribution's potential by implementing an energy-aware routing algorithm that adapts to real-world Energy Flexibility data in a Metropolitan Area Network (MAN). Also, it showcases the simulator's capacity to deal with large-scale simulations through MPI-based distributed environments.