mtCloudSim: A Flow-Level Network Simulator for Multi-Tenant Cloud

Currently, novel topologies and advanced resource allocation strategies for multi-tenant cloud datacenters are two research hotspots. Due to the high convenience and efficiency, researchers tend to use simulation to evaluate the proposed topologies or strategies. However, the current network simulators do not support the multi-tenant cloud environment inherently. Moreover, the low simulation speed and high memory consumption limit the traditional packet-level simulators to estimate the scenario of large-scale datacenters. In this paper, we propose a new flow-level network simulator, mtCloudSim, to overcome the above issues. The simulator estimates the data flow's behavior in the real world, i.e., 1) increasing the sending rate when the network is not busy and 2) suspending when the congestion occurs. Bandwidth isolation is inherently provided and users are allowed to define bandwidth requirement for the experiments with our simulator. Object-oriented programming (OOP) makes it easy to evaluate novel network topologies. The tracing system is also able to generate abundant and detailed statistics for experiments. The experiments demonstrate that mtCloudSim is available for multi-tenant cloud evaluation.