Héctor: A Framework for Testing IoT Applications Across Heterogeneous Edge and Cloud Testbeds

Abstract

As a result of the many technical advances in microcomputers and mobile connectivity, the Internet of Things (IoT) has been on the rise in the recent decade. Due to the broad spectrum of applications, networks facilitating IoT scenarios can be of very different scale and complexity. Additionally, connected devices are uncommonly heterogeneous, including micro controllers, smartphones, fog nodes and server infrastructures. Therefore, testing IoT applications is difficult, motivating adequate tool support. In this paper, we present Héctor, a framework for the automatic testing of IoT applications. Héctor allows the automated execution of user-defined experiments on agnostic IoT testbeds. To test applications independently of the availability of required devices, the framework is able to generate virtual testbeds with adjustable network properties. Our evaluations show that simple experiments can be easily automated across a broad spectrum of testbeds. However, the results also indicate that there is considerable interference in experiments, in which many devices are emulated, due to the high resource demand of system emulation.