An HLA-based Cloud Simulator for Mobile Cloud Environments

Mobile Cloud Computing is a concept infrastructure wherein Cloud Computing resources are utilized to offload tasks from mobile elements. The combination of Cloud Computing and Mobile Computing increases the complexity of modeling and performance evaluation in terms of task scheduling policies, energy consumption model, the mobility of mobile devices over a layered architecture of both local Clouds and remote Cloud data centers. In this paper, a distributed HLA-based Cloud toolkit is proposed, enabling the modeling and simulation of Mobile Cloud Computing environment. The proposed toolkit simulates the behaviors of the Mobile system and the Cloud infrastructure, within which different resource scheduling policies can be evaluated in a repeatable manner. In addition, an HLA-based simulation scheduling scheme is proposed, trying to improve simulation execution efficiency by automatically parallelizing and distributing simulation components. A Cloud-based simulation resource management paradigm is also implemented, handling the configuration and maintenance issues regarding underlying system resources and simulation data. Based on the experiments, the proposed toolkit can achieve better simulation execution efficiency, with consideration of both Cloud and Mobile behaviors, compared to current Cloud Computing environment simulators.