Fog and cloud collaboration to perform virtual simulation experiments

Fog Computing can enhance users’ quality of service, particularly when countless users spread around the globe to access the same Cloud resources. We present a set of collaboration mechanisms between Fog and Cloud computing resources to conduct simulation experiments. A user creates an experiment on a Fog server (with a model attached to it) without worrying where and how the simulation will be executed. Once a simulation starts, the experiment reach servers with simulation environments that can execute the model and then needs to select the best servers to perform the actual simulation. We introduce the concept of Virtual Experiments (VE) to decouple M&S environments specifics from the general experiment framework, providing interplay processing units between users and simulation servers. In addition, we present a Fog/Cloud scalable architecture, and discuss how the M&S capabilities are advertised, structured in pools, dynamically discovered, and selected to simulate. As a proof of concept, we built our concrete private Clouds and Fogs based on OpenStack to demonstrate the proposed ideas using various Fog and Cloud physical, deployment and computing capabilities