Energy modeling in cloud simulation frameworks

There is a quite intensive research for Cloud simulators in the recent years, mainly due to the fact that the need for powerful computational resources has led organizations to use cloud resources instead of acquiring and maintaining private servers. In order to test and optimize the strategies that are being used on cloud resources, cloud simulators have been developed since the simulation cost is substantially smaller than experimenting on real cloud environments. Several cloud simulation frameworks have been proposed during the last years, focusing on various components of the cloud resources. In this paper, a survey on cloud simulators is conducted, in order to examine the different models that have been used for the hardware components that constitute a cloud data center. Focus is given on the energy models that have been proposed for the prediction of the energy consumption of data center components, such as CPU, memory, storage and network, while experiments are performed in order to compare the different power models used by the simulation frameworks. The following cloud simulation frameworks are considered: CloudSched, CloudSim, DCSim, GDCSim, GreenCloud and iCanCloud.