Multi-level Simulation of Internet of Things on Smart Territories

TL;DR

This paper presents a multi-level simulation framework for large-scale IoT environments in smart territories, combining coarse and fine-grained models to handle scalability and heterogeneity effectively.

Contribution

It introduces a novel multi-level simulation approach that integrates agent-based and detailed wireless communication models for large-scale IoT deployment in decentralized areas.

Findings

Multi-level simulation effectively models large-scale IoT environments.

Wireless networking technologies are key for deploying smart services.

The approach confirms the viability of multi-level simulation for IoT scalability.

Abstract

In this paper, a methodology is presented and employed for simulating the Internet of Things (IoT). The requirement for scalability, due to the possibly huge amount of involved sensors and devices, and the heterogeneous scenarios that might occur, impose resorting to sophisticated modeling and simulation techniques. In particular, multi-level simulation is regarded as a main framework that allows simulating large-scale IoT environments while keeping high levels of detail, when it is needed. We consider a use case based on the deployment of smart services in decentralized territories. A two level simulator is employed, which is based on a coarse agent-based, adaptive parallel and distributed simulation approach to model the general life of simulated entities. However, when needed a finer grained simulator (based on OMNeT++) is triggered on a restricted portion of the simulated area, which allows considering all issues concerned with wireless communications. Based on this use case, it is confirmed that the ad-hoc wireless networking technologies do represent a principle tool to deploy smart services over decentralized countrysides. Moreover, the performance evaluation confirms the viability of utilizing multi-level simulation for simulating large scale IoT environments.