Energy- Aware Distributed Simulation for Mobile Platforms: An Empirical Study

Abstract

The rapid increase of the computing power on embedded and handheld de- vices has made these devices attractive for many applications including sim- ulation systems. There are a number of Parallel Discrete Event Simulation (PDES) frameworks that exists but most of these are designed for traditional cluster systems and are not suitable for battery operated devices where en- ergy and power consumption are among the major concerns. A new PDES framework is thus required that takes into account the typical constraints of the mobile devices. However, before designing a new PDES framework that is speci cally aimed for mobile devices, it is helpful to analyze the performance of existing frameworks. In this work, well-known Rensselaer's Optimistic Simulation System (ROSS) framework has been instrumented for a detailed analysis of its performance in terms of CPU usage, memory consumption, and energy and power requirements. This pro ling helps in many ways. For example, one can select the most appropriate synchronizations algorithm for running the PDES frameworks on the mobile devices. Additionally, identi - cation of resource intensive modules within the framework can be extremely useful in redesign/optimization of these frameworks while being ported to the heterogeneous environments. Based on these observations, a new simulation framework is proposed that is speci cally designed for running on handheld devices. The simulation framework, that is called SEECSSim1, is the rst one designed keeping in mind the characteristics and the constraints that are typical of mobile devices. SEECSSim includes the support for a number of state-of-the-art synchronization protocols and, thanks to its exible design, the users can easily integrate any other simulation model/synchronization algorithm of their choice. The performance of SEECSSim has been studied using a well-known simulation model (i.e. PHOLD) for di erent synchroniza- tion algorithms.