Investigating Placement Challenges in Edge Infrastructures through a Common Simulator (extended version)

Scheduling computational jobs with data-sets dependencies is an important challenge of edge computing infrastructures. Although several strategies have been proposed, they have been evaluated through ad-hoc simulator extensions that are, when available, usually not maintained. This is a critical problem because it prevents researchers to-easily-perform fair comparisons between different proposals. In this paper, we propose to address this limitation by presenting a simulation engine dedicated to the evaluation and comparison of scheduling and data movement policies for edge computing use-cases. Built upon the Batsim/SimGrid toolkit, our tool includes a plug-in system that allows researchers to add new models in order to cope with the diversity of edge computing devices. Moreover, it includes an injector that allows the simulator to replay a series of events captured in real infrastructures. We demonstrate the relevance of such a simulation toolkit by studying 2 scheduling strategies with 4 data movement policies on top of a simulated version of the Qarnot Computing platform, a production edge infrastructure based on smart heaters. We chose this use-case as it illustrates the heterogeneity as well as the uncertainties of edge infrastructures. Our ultimate goal is to gather industry and academics around a common simulator so that efforts made by one group can be factorized by others.