Renovation: An Efficient Discrete-Event Approach

[khchenTW]

Hello all,

tl;dr, now the simulation can be done way faster while simulating the same setups as the original simulator.

I would like to file this pull request to enhance EdgeCloudSim. We have noticed that the original design of EdgeCloudSim suffers from certain efficiency and scalability issues due to the ignorance of the deficiency in the originally adopted data structures and maintenance strategies.

Specifically, it generates all events at the beginning of the simulation and stores unnecessary historical information, both resulting in unnecessarily high complexity for search operations. In this work, by fixing the mismatches on the concept of discrete-event simulation, we improve not only the runtime efficiency of simulation but also the flexibility and scalability. Through extensive experiments with statistical methods, we show that the enhancement does not affect the expressiveness of simulations while obtaining 2 orders of magnitude speedup, especially when the device count is large.

More details can be found in this preprint, which is presented in FMEC'21 as well.

Best,
Kuan-Hsun