ifogsim – Benny Akesson

Good news everyone! Our paper “Analysing Per-Application Energy Consumption in a Multi-Application Computing Continuum” was accepted at the 9th International Conference on Fog and Mobile Edge Computing (FMEC 2024). This paper was first-authored by Saeedeh Baneshi, a PhD student at the University of Amsterdam, and complements her earlier work “Estimating the Energy Consumption of Applications in the Computing Continuum with iFogSim“. Congratulations on another accepted paper Saeedeh!

The paper addresses the challenge of analyzing the energy consumption of applications distributed over edge devices and data centers in the compute continuum. The goal is to enable stakeholders, such as cloud providers, developers, users, and researchers, to improve energy efficiency, optimize resource usage, and reduce the environmental impact of such applications. To this end, the work proposes a fine-grained simulation approach for analyzing application energy behavior in edge/cloud environments, based on the iFogSim framework. The three main contributions of the work are: 1) An extension is proposed to iFogSim’s energy model to also consider the energy consumption of communication, 2) iFogSim’s reporting is improved to collect finer-grained data, an essential improvement for analysis of multi-application scenarios, and 3) The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated by evaluating different multi-application scenarios and configurations for a distributed video surveillance application.

I am happy to please that the paper “Estimating the Energy Consumption of Applications in the Computing Continuum with iFogSim” was accepted at the International Workshop on Converged Computing (WOCC). The paper is first-authored by Saaedeh Baneshi and is the first publication to come out of the project Energy Labels for Digital Services. Congratulations Saaedeh!

The paper explains how digital services – applications that often span the entire computing continuum – have become an essential part of our daily lives, but they can have a significant energy cost, raising sustainability concerns. Measuring the energy consumption of such applications is challenging due to the distributed nature of the system and the application. As such, simulation techniques are promising solutions to estimate energy consumption, and several simulators are available for modeling the cloud and fog computing environment. The paper investigates iFogSim’s effectiveness in analyzing the end-to-end energy consumption of applications in the computing continuum through two case studies. We design different scenarios for each case study to map application modules to devices along the continuum, including the Edge-Cloud collaboration architecture, and compare them with the two placement policies native to iFogSim: Cloud-only and Edge-ward policies. We observe iFogSim’s limitations in reporting energy consumption, and improve its ability to report energy consumption from an application’s perspective; this enables additional insight into an application’s energy consumption, thus enhancing the usability of iFogSim in evaluating the end-to-end energy consumption of digital services.