VIoLET: A Large-scale Virtual Environment for Internet of Things

TL;DR

VIoLET is a scalable virtual environment that enables realistic large-scale IoT deployment testing within cloud VMs, bridging the gap between simulation and real-world deployment validation.

Contribution

It introduces a declarative, container-based model for realistic IoT environment emulation at large scale, matching native device performance and complex network configurations.

Findings

Successfully deployed over 400 devices and 1500 cores.

Virtual environment closely matches native device compute and network performance.

Cost-effective solution for large-scale IoT testing.

Abstract

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 VIoLET, a virtual environment for defining and launching large-scale IoT deployments within cloud VMs. It offers a declarative model to specify container-based compute resources that match the performance of the native edge, fog and cloud devices using Docker. These can be inter-connected by complex topologies on which private/public networks, and bandwidth and latency rules are enforced. Users can configure synthetic sensors for data generation on these devices as well. We validate VIoLET for deployments with > 400 devices and > 1500 device-cores, and show that the virtual IoT environment closely matches the expected compute and network performance at modest costs. This fills an important gap between IoT simulators and real deployments.