Simulation for urban computing scenarios: An overview and research challenges

Urban computing is an emerging computing paradigm for processing urban data to serve urban applications, which is an important manner to realize smart cities. To be specific, cloud computing and edge computing are usually leveraged to support urban computing. As a distributed and extended solution for cloud computing, edge computing is capable of providing better data services for IoT devices. However, edge computing resources are widely distributed and edge devices are highly mobile. To guarantee the QoS (Quality of Service), it is challenging to decide where to distribute the computing resources according to edge devices, especially around a specific urban area. Therefore, it is essential to simulate and verify the solution through evaluation tools before practical deployment in urban scenarios. But urban computing is a relatively new paradigm, there are few evaluation tools for direct usage. To provide hints for useful tools, we perform a survey study on existing evaluation tools for edge computing, which can be somehow applied to urban computing. In this paper, we first classify and define the evaluation tools into three categories: simulators, emulators, and testbeds. Then we perform a comprehensive study on the above three categories. Finally, we conclude the research challenges for urban computing based on current evaluation tools.