IoTreeplay: Synchronous Distributed Traffic Replay in IoT Environments

Abstract

Use-cases in the Internet of Things (IoT) typically involve a high number of interconnected, heterogeneous devices. Due to the criticality of many IoT scenarios, systems and applications need to be tested thoroughly before rollout. Existing staging environments and testing frameworks are able to emulate network properties but fail to deliver actual network-wide traffic control to test systems application independently. To extend existing frameworks, we present the distributed traffic replaying tool IoTreeplay. The tool embeds TCPLivePlay into an environment that allows the synchronous replaying of network traffic with multiple endpoints and connections. Replaying takes place in a user-defined network or testbed containing IoT use-cases. Network traffic can be captured and compared to the original trace to evaluate accuracy and reliability. The resulting implementation is able to accurately replay connections within a maximum transmission rate but struggles with deviations from regular TCP connections, like packet loss or connection reset. An evaluation has been performed, measuring individual and aggregated delays between packets, based on the recorded timestamps.