Energy-driven cloud simulation: existing surveys, simulation supports, impacts and challenges

A large scale cloud data center is needed to provision various applications in different domains. As a result, power consumption is expected to increase due to huge operations and expansion of cloud data centers. Furthermore, it also intensifies environment concern. Various approaches and solutions for energy-driven cloud data center have been proposed to overcome this challenge. Testing and evaluating these solutions in large scale is costly and time consuming. Hence, simulation techniques become the preferred approach to tackle this concern. There are a few cloud simulators have been developed with different features and capabilities which can be chosen for this reason. A survey work can serve as a guideline. A few cloud simulation surveys have been done but limited survey is found for energy-driven cloud simulation. This review complements the existing surveys by considering different aspects of energy-driven cloud simulators. Therefore, this paper presents a review of existing cloud simulation surveys with several classifications. Furthermore, it provides some insights of the selected cloud simulators by emphasizing on the energy-driven simulation supports and the impact of the cloud simulators in succeeding works. This paper also highlights open and future challenges.