NS3SaaS: Cloud-based “Network Simulator as a Service” with customisable resource scheduling

This paper presents the design, development and evaluation of a novel cloud-based Network Simulator as a Service. It wraps a discrete-event network simulator and deploys it as an elastic service, which can then be used for interactive and batch simulations execution, enhanced with results post-processing and analysis as well as presentation features. It addresses the requirement to rapidly carry out large numbers of network simulations in order to test and validate appropriate and domain specific optimisations in industry, research and education settings. This cloud based service drastically enhances the capabilities of a researcher by allowing arbitrary definition of simulation scenarios along with sets of parameters and commission of large scale simulation executions. It is based on an ensemble of efficient open-source tools, which, when properly coordinated, deliver to the end user a cloud based service that is novel, robust, extendible and extensible. It has been deployed within ESDA Lab (UoP, Greece) where several performance evaluation research scenarios were carried out testing different simulation scheduling schemes in order to evaluate the usefulness of our system and its efficiency under different prioritisation settings. Results demonstrate that, compared to the default general purpose network simulator, the offered cloud-based service significantly enhances end-users capabilities by tailor fitting to their different prioritisation requirements, e.g. favouring interactive users, minimising turnaround times, offering custom resources allocation, etc. In addition to that the offered service effectively hides the peculiarities of the standalone network simulator enabling its use by non-experts and significantly expanding the potential target group of end users.