CLEVERsim: A Declarative, Event-Driven Simulator for the Investigation of Large Scale M2M Scenarios

The growth in machine-to-machine communications and the closer integration of critical infrastructures and systems is creating larger and ever more complex system of systems. The resulting data explosion and inter-dependencies could have far-reaching implications for the system as a whole. There is a critical need to understand the effects of complex distributed systems interactions, their demands on the communications infrastructure, and the impact of different design decisions and implementation strategies. Although many network simulation tools already exist, the simulation of large and complex distributed systems remains a significant challenge. Traditional network simulators tend to focus protocol performance, rather than system-level interactions. This paper describes CLEVERsim-a declarative, event-driven, simulation tool developed specifically to address the challenges of simulating very large M2M communications scenarios, represented by 1) potentially large computational time and memory requirements, and 2) the need to maximise value within constraints.