A Microservices Oriented Edge Computing Framework for LVC Simulation in the IoT Era

Modeling and simulation are essential methods to better understand a complex system in the real world. Many simulation systems have strong demand for involving physical devices or equipment in the system to improve the fidelity. But most of the current cloud based simulation systems are designed for equipment with adequate resources and suffering from high latency for their centralized communication. Edge computing is getting much attention as a new paradigm for distributed systems involving heterogeneous devices and requiring real-time communication. However, edge computing is still in its initial stage and there is no consensus on the edge framework and implementation. To the best of our knowledge, no detailed studies have explored the edge-side simulation and modeling. In this paper, we study and design an edge-side simulation framework, which exploits light-weight microservices architecture to build scalable and real-time LVC (Live, Virtual and Constructive) simulations. Specifically, the application model is designed to illustrate how LVC simulation integrates with edge computing and cloud computing. The autonomous negotiation service and time synchronization services are discussed in details. Though it is a preliminary edge computing framework for LVC simulation, no similar research has been conducted for modeling and simulation using edge computing.