Toward Distributed Heterogeneous Simulation Using Internet of Things

Parallel discrete event simulation frameworks have been widely used to analyze the performance of traditional applications under different scenarios. The existing frameworks are designed to work on a cluster and cloud-based computing environments. With the current advances in the Internet of Things, there is a strong need to revamp such traditional frameworks and make use of the smart connected-devices as an underlying infrastructure to perform simulations. In this article, we propose a new simulation framework, which has been specifically designed to work with diverse heterogeneous devices. The framework allows these heterogeneous mobile devices to participate in a distributed simulation while managing network latency, using device profiles that are maintained by the simulation framework. Moreover, in the proposed framework, random and context-aware simulation task distributions have been explored to manage the devices’ sporadic connectivity. Evaluation results using the well-known PHOLD benchmark demonstrate a gain in the overall efficiency of the proposed simulation system.