Cloud-based Simulation for Education: An Illustrative Scenario

Computer simulation is a technique often used in education to study and understand the behaviour and characteristics of a real system, applications or platforms. However, in order to achieve reasonable response times for an educational setting, many computational resources are demanded, which often leads to an oversized infrastructure. This pa- per discusses the use of cloud computing as an enabler of new learning scenarios through the use of Software as a Service (SaaS) applications deployed on top of an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud. The Cloud-based Distributed Network Simulation Environment (CloudDNSE) is the proposed SaaS, designed following Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Representational State Transfer (REST) principles, and used in a real educational scenario of Computer Networks. Benefits as scalability, on-demand provisioning or pay-per-use billing model allow to improve the learning design and process, overcoming technological limitations such as lack of computational resources.