Simulation environment for scalability and performance analysis in hierarchically organized IoT systems

Abstract

The accelerated development of technologies, especially in the field of telecommunications, ease the integration of embedded devices within various IoT applications. Modern IoT applications assume heterogenous embedded platforms capable of collecting, processing, and exchanging data between the tiers of the IoT system architecture. Designing a multi-tier IoT system, even in the case of architecture that involves a small number of intelligent embedded devices, can be a very demanding process, especially when dealing with the strict requirements of IoT application concerning application performance, scalability, and energy consumption. In this paper, an open-source simulation framework for the performance analysis of an arbitrary multi-tiered IoT system is presented. Framework supports insight into the data availability within the tiers of IoT system enabling designers to evaluate the performance of IoT application and to engineer the system operation and deployment. Besides the performance analysis, proposed framework enables the analysis of energy consumption, architecture scalability utilizing different communication patterns and technologies. The case study of a large-scale IoT application for demonstrating the framework potential regarding the scalability and data availability analysis is also given.