Modeling and simulation of cloud computing: A review

Cloud computing provides computing resources as a service over a network. As rapid application of this emerging technology in real world, it becomes more and more important how to evaluate the performance and security problems that cloud computing confronts. Currently, modeling and simulation technology has become a useful and powerful tool in cloud computing research community to deal with these issues. In this paper, to the best of our knowledge, we review the existing results on modeling and simulation of cloud computing. We start from reviewing the basic concepts of cloud computing and its security issues, and subsequently review the existing cloud computing simulators. Furthermore, we indicate that there exist two types of cloud computing simulators, that is, simulators just based on software and simulators based on both software and hardware. Finally, we analyze and compare features of the existing cloud computing simulators.