Towards a large-scale IoT Emulation Testbed based on Container Technology

Abstract

Testing new applications and network protocols in IoT systems is a challenging and time-consuming task. As a result of this, a significant number of testbed platforms have been built in recent few decades. In this paper, we present our work-in-progress IoTs testbed, namely UiTiOt, which is a Container-based testbed for wireless/IoTs networks. In contrast to many existing testbeds using real devices, we use emulation-based approach to achieve the cost-effective objectives. QOMET – a well-known network emulation tool, is deployed as a key-point component in our system to imitate the wireless IoTs communication behaviors in a wired network, in real time. Our research aims to build a testbed with large-scalability, easy-to-use, high reliability as well as the flexibility in the deployment of multiples experimental scenarios at a reasonable cost. Taking advance of cloud computing technology, our testbed deployed the experimental nodes on the OpenStack infrastructure at the University of Information Technology (UiT) to exploit the advantage ‘pay-as-you-go’ of cloud computing. In addition, Container which is a state-of-the-art virtualization platform has also been using in UiTiOt to resolve the problem of scalability. In order to show up the performance and the reliability of our testbed, several experiments were carried out and discussed in this paper.