Experimenting with Request Assignment Simulator (RAS)

There is no existence of dedicated simulators on the Internet that studies the impact of load balancing principles of the cloud architectures. Request Assignment Simulator (RAS) is a customizable, visual tool that helps to understand the request assignment to the resources, based on the load balancing principles. The authors have designed this simulator to fit into Infrastructure as a Service cloud model. In this paper, the authors present a working manual useful for the conduct of experiment with RAS. The objective of this paper is to instill the user to understand the pertinent parameters in the cloud, their metrics, load balancing principles, and their impact on the performance.