SIM-Cumulus: An Academic Cloud for the Provisioning of Network-Simulation-as-a-Service (NSaaS)

Large-scale network simulations are resource and time intensive tasks due to a number of factors i.e., setup configuration, computation time, hardware, and energy cost. These factors ultimately force network researchers to scale-down the scope of experiments, either in terms of simulation entities involved or in abridging expected micro-level details. The Cloud technology facilitates researchers to address mentioned factors by the provisioning of pre-configured instances on shared infrastructure. In this paper, an academic Cloud architecture SIM-Cumulus targeting the research institutions is proposed. SIM-Cumulus provides the framework of virtual machine instances specifically configured for large-scale network simulations, with the aim of efficiency in terms of simulation execution time and energy cost. The performance of SIM-Cumulus is evaluated using large-scale wireless network simulations. Simulation results show that SIM-Cumulus is beneficial in three aspects i.e., 1) promotion of research within the domain of computer networks; 2) consumption of considerably fewer resources in terms of simulation elapsed time and usage cost; and 3) reduction of carbon emission leading toward sustainable IT development.