Quality based cloud simulators: State-of-the-art & road ahead

Cloud Computing is an emerging technology nowadays. It has been used by many leading organisations. They deploy their critical information onto the cloud. Several challenges are associated with it like quality issues, security, energy consumption etc. Continuous research is going on to cater these issues. It is not easy to setup a cloud for any researcher or group of researchers, it needs huge investment. Big organisations having huge budgets can only afford that. To address these issues cloud simulators are really helpful. Cloud simulator is a simulating environment through which one can realize actual cloud environment. Data centers, virtual machines, hosts and networks can be setup virtually. Numbers of cloud simulators are there in the literature each offering different scenario. Cloudsim, a well known cloud simulator calculates start time, finish time and total time for execution of cloudlet. Another cloud simulator GreenCloud calculates energy consumption by data centers, hosts, switches and other network equipments. In the present paper, we focus on quality metrics addressed by cloud simulators. With each simulator, we will enlist quality metrics discussed by them. At the end, we conclude that there is a need to develop simulator which will address relevant quality metrics.