We need new testing tools and simulators to assess the behavior of distributed applications in the emerging computing environments of the Internet of Things.
Motivation
The Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, and machine learning will allow for more adaptive cities, houses, and infrastructure. However, the vision of intelligent cyber-physical systems will not be implemented with centralized cloud resources alone as these are simply too far away from sensor-equipped IoT devices, yielding high latencies, network bottlenecks, unnecessary energy consumption, and in many cases also privacy concerns. Addressing this, edge and fog computing promise resources in closer proximity to sensor-equipped IoT devices. However, to develop and research new IoT applications for these new environments, adequate tools are needed that allow to test and evaluate the performance, dependability, and efficiency of applications.
Approaches
As it is still much harder to assess whether IoT applications will meet their non-functional requirements (such as constraints for their performance, dependability, and efficiency), compared to, for instance, cloud applications, we are currently working on simulation/emulation tools at different granularities. For example, simulations can help to estimate the power usage of applications deployed across edge, fog, and cloud resources over time. Moreover, emulation of network controllers can enable research on the behavior of real-time tasks on IoT devices, while combining hybrid testbeds with co-simulation can essentially provide “staging environments” for distributed IoT applications. These tools will help to develop new resource management methods, where an efficient and reliable distributed resource management is widely understood to be essential for the new computing environments of the Internet of Things.
Publications
- IoTreeplay: Synchronous Distributed Traffic Replay in IoT Environments. Markus Toll, Ilja Behnke, and Odej Kao. International Conference on Cloud Engineering (IC2E). IEEE. 2022. [arXiv preprint]
- Towards a Staging Environment for the Internet of Things. Jossekin Beilharz, Philipp Wiesner, Arne Boockmeyer, Florian Brokhausen, Ilja Behnke, Robert Schmid, Lukas Pirl, and Lauritz Thamsen. In the Proceedings of the 19th IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications Workshops (PerCom Workshops). Presented in the Work in Progress (WiP) session of the conference. IEEE. 2021. [arXiv preprint]
- PIERES: A Playground for Network Interrupt Experiments on Real-Time Embedded Systems in the IoT. Franz Bender, Jan Jonas Brune, Nick Lauritz Keutel, Ilja Behnke and Lauritz Thamsen. In the International Conference on Performance Engineering Companion (LTB ‘21). ACM/SPEC. 2021. [arXiv preprint]
- LEAF: Simulating Large Energy-Aware Fog Computing Environments. Philipp Wiesner and Lauritz Thamsen. In the Proceedings of the 2021 IEEE 5th International Conference on Fog and Edge Computing (ICFEC). IEEE. 2021. [arXiv preprint] [video] [code]
- Effectively Testing System Configurations of Critical IoT Analytics Pipelines. Morgan K. Geldenhuys, Lauritz Thamsen, Kain Kordian Gontarska, Felix Lorenz, and Odej Kao. In the Proceedings of the 2019 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (IEEE BigData). Presented at the Second International Workshop on the Internet of Things Data Analytics (IoTDA). IEEE. 2019. [Google Scholar]
- Héctor: A Framework for Testing IoT Applications Across Heterogeneous Edge and Cloud Testbeds. Ilja Behnke, Lauritz Thamsen, and Odej Kao. In the Companion of the 12th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing (UCC Companion). Presented at the 8th International Workshop on Cloud and Edge Computing and Applications Management (CloudAM). ACM. 2019. [Google Scholar]
If you have any questions or are interested in collaborating with us on this topic, please get in touch with Lauritz!