Abstract:
At present much research is being carried out into simulating the performance
of Cloud computing services and infrastructures. One area which appears to
have been overlooked so far is the human aspect. Human usage patterns
clearly have a large impact on the levels of service demand at speci c time
points. Agents have long been employed to simulate complex real-world en-
vironments in urban environments, computer games and other application
areas. This thesis examines whether similar techniques can be developed for
modelling the usage patterns of cloud users and their behaviours. The pur-
pose of this work is to explore and simulate the requests of cloud users for
IAAS services. In order to achieve this the rst phase was to gather realistic
data. After gathering as much realistic data as was available, a multi-agent
simulator was implemented which had three layers of hierarchy. These in-
cluded planning, task utilization and allocation e ciency and a multi-agent
simulation environment was implemented using these features. To validate
the approach simulated cloud users behaviour was compared with real-world
usage patterns which were gathered and then analysed using quantitative
analysis. The results con rm that the approach is approximately 80% ac-
curate and therefore it would appear that the simulator is realistic enough
to be useful for generating usage patterns which can then feed into existing
models in order to provide a more realistic picture of an IAAS environment.
