ECSNeT++ : A simulator for distributed stream processing on edge and cloud environments

Gayashan Amarasinghe (1, 2) , Marcos Dias de Assuncao (3, 4, 5) , Aaron Harwood (1, 2) , Shanika Karunasekera (1, 2)

1 Department of Computing and Information Systems
2 The University of MelbourneParkville, VIC, Australia.
3 AVALON - Algorithms and Software Architectures for Distributed and HPC Platforms
4 LIP - Laboratoire de l'Informatique du Parallélisme
5 ENS de Lyon - École normale supérieure de Lyon

The objective of Internet of Things (IoT) is ubiquitous computing. As a result many computing enabled, connected devices are deployed in various environments, where these devices keep generating unbounded event streams related to the deployed environment. The common paradigm is to process these event streams at the cloud using the available Distributed Stream Processing (DSP) frameworks. However, with the emergence of Edge Computing, another convenient computing paradigm has been presented for executing such applications. Edge computing introduces the concept of using the underutilised potential of a large number of computing enabled connected devices such as IoT, located outside the cloud. In order to develop optimal strategies to utilise this vast number of potential resources, a realistic test bed is required. However, due to the overwhelming scale and heterogeneity of the edge computing device deployments, the amount of effort and investment required to set up such an environment is high. Therefore, a realistic simulation environment that can accurately predict the behaviour and performance of a large-scale, real deployment is extremely valuable. While the state-of-the-art simulation tools consider different aspects of executing applications on edge or cloud computing environments, we found that no simulator considers all the key characteristics to perform a realistic simulation of the execution of DSP applications on edge and cloud computing environments. To the best of our knowledge, the publicly available simulators lack being verified against real world experimental measurements, i.e. for calibration and to obtain accurate estimates of e.g. latency and power consumption. In this paper, we present our ECSNeT++ simulation toolkit which has been verified using real world experimental measurements for executing DSP applications on edge and cloud computing environments. ECSNeT++ models deployment and processing of DSP applications on edge-cloud environments and is built on top of OMNeT++/INET. By using multiple configurations of two real DSP applications, we show that ECSNeT++ is able to model a real deployment, with proper calibration. We believe that with the public availability of ECSNeT++ as an open source framework, and the verified accuracy of our results, ECSNeT++ can be used effectively for predicting the behaviour and performance of DSP applications running on large scale, heterogeneous edge and cloud computing device deployments.

Mots clés: Edge Computing; Simulation; Internet of Things; Distributed Stream Processing

Domaines: Réseaux et télécommunications [cs.NI]

Gayashan Amarasinghe, Marcos Dias de Assuncao, Aaron Harwood, Shanika Karunasekera. ECSNeT++ : A simulator for distributed stream processing on edge and cloud environments. Future Generation Computer Systems, 2020, 111, pp.401-418. ⟨10.1016/j.future.2019.11.014⟩. ⟨hal-02369500⟩