Towards a Staging Environment for the Internet of Things

TL;DR

This paper introduces Marvis, a framework for creating realistic staging environments for IoT applications by integrating hybrid testbeds, co-simulations, and network simulations to better emulate real-world deployment conditions.

Contribution

The paper presents Marvis, a novel framework that combines multiple simulation and testbed components to facilitate realistic testing of IoT applications in a controlled environment.

Findings

Open source prototype of Marvis available

Demonstrated V2X communication scenario using Marvis

Preliminary results show potential for realistic IoT testing environments

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) applications promise to make many aspects of our lives more efficient and adaptive through the use of distributed sensing and computing nodes. A central aspect of such applications is their complex communication behavior that is heavily influenced by the physical environment of the system. To continuously improve IoT applications, a staging environment is needed that can provide operating conditions representative of deployments in the actual production environments -- similar to what is common practice in cloud application development today. Towards such a staging environment, we present Marvis, a framework that orchestrates hybrid testbeds, co-simulated domain environments, and a central network simulation for testing distributed IoT applications. Our preliminary results include an open source prototype and a demonstration of a Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication scenario.