YAFS: A Simulator for IoT Scenarios in Fog Computing

Fog computing is a paradigm that extends the cloud to intermediate network devices with computational and storage capacities. This allows the execution of applications closer to edge devices and end-users by allocating services in those intermediate devices. The placement of those services has an influence on the performance of the fog architecture. We propose a fog computing simulator for analyzing the design and deployment of applications through customized and dynamical strategies. We model the relationships among deployed applications, network connections, and infrastructure characteristics through complex network theory, enabling the integration of topological measures in dynamic and customizable strategies, such as the placement of application modules, workload location, and path routing and scheduling of services. We present a comparative analysis of the efficiency and the convergence of results of our simulator with the most referenced one, iFogSim. To highlight the YAFS functionalities, we model three scenarios that, to the best of our knowledge, cannot be implemented with current fog simulators: dynamic allocation of new application modules, dynamic failures of network nodes, and user mobility along with the topology.