VIoLET: An Emulation Environment for Validating IoT Deployments at Large Scales

Internet of Things (IoT) deployments have been growing manifold, encompassing sensors, networks, edge, fog, and cloud resources. Despite the intense interest from researchers and practitioners, most do not have access to large-scale IoT testbeds for validation. Simulation environments that allow analytical modeling are a poor substitute for evaluating software platforms or application workloads in realistic computing environments. Here, we propose a virtual environment for validating Internet of Things at large scales (VIoLET), an emulator for defining and launching large-scale IoT deployments within cloud VMs. It allows users to declaratively specify container-based compute resources that match the performance of native IoT compute devices using Docker. These can be inter-connected by complex topologies on which bandwidth and latency rules are enforced. Users can configure synthetic sensors for data generation as well. We also incorporate models for CPU resource dynamism, and for failure and recovery of the underlying devices. We offer a detailed comparison of VIoLET’s compute and network performance between the virtual and physical deployments, evaluate its scaling with deployments with up to 1,000 devices and 4, 000 device-cores, and validate its ability to model resource dynamism. Our extensive experiments show that the performance of the virtual IoT environment accurately matches the expected behavior, with deviations levels within what is seen in actual physical devices. It also scales to 1, 000s of devices and at a modest cloud computing costs of under 0.15% of the actual hardware cost, per hour of use, with minimal management effort. This IoT emulation environment fills an essential gap between IoT simulators and real deployments.