A survey and taxonomy of simulation environments modelling fog computing

In the past ten years, the latest advances in Information and Communication Technology had a significant impact on distributed systems by giving birth to paradigms such as Cloud Computing, Fog Computing and the Internet of Things (IoT). The environments they created are closely coupled in most cases: IoT sensors and devices generate data that have to be stored, processed and analysed by cloud or fog services, depending on the actual application needs. These IoT-Fog-Cloud systems are very complex, and the use of simulations in their design, development and operational processes is inevitable. Nowadays, there are many simulator solutions available to model and analyse these systems depending our research needs, but in many cases it is hard to grasp their differences, and implementing certain scenarios in different tools is time consuming. The goal of this work is to help researchers and practitioners in this regard by proposing a survey and taxonomy of the available simulators modelling clouds, IoT and specifically fogs, which is the latest, currently still forming paradigm. The main contributions of this study are our novel viewpoints for classification including software quality, which is performed by analysing the source code of the considered simulators. We also propose comparison tables for three groups of simulators that reveal their differences and the way they model the elements of these systems. Finally, we discuss the relevant findings of our classifications, and highlight open issues that need further research.