E-IoT: Emulator to Develop and Test IoT Application

Abstract

Our living and working spaces are full of smart devices (e.g., appliances, sensors) -known as things- and are leading the technological revolution of the Internet of Things (IoT). An IoT ecosystem is a paradigm of connecting things and developing applications to improve the quality of our lives through building smart spaces. IoT things are heterogeneous in the processing and sensing capabilities, the used communication protocols and standards, and the services and functionalities they offer. IoT applications utilize such a heterogeneous ecosystem in several fields, however, the application development process is restricted by the physical acquisition and access to real IoT things to deploy and test IoT applications. Given such a number of heterogeneous devices, such a requirement is considered expensive and also infeasible in most cases. In this paper, we present E-IoT, an environment that emulates smart spaces by virtualizing the operation of IoT things. Over virtualization concepts and technologies, E-IoT provides real operating and working environments by utilizing a range of IoT -designed operating systems, protocols, and libraries to emulate IoT device's software capabilities. E-IoT also simulates the hardware capabilities to run hardware-dependent instructions and interactions. E-IoT enables developers to develop, deploy, and test a wide range of IoT interactions and applications before the deployment on real things. E-IoT provides a graphical user interface for developers to visualize the operation and status of IoT devices in real-time. We present details of the proposed environment, highlight several key capabilities and aspects, and demonstrate some features through a proof-of-concept implementation.