A Domain-Specific Language for Simulation-Based Testing of IoT Edge-to-Cloud Solutions

TL;DR

The paper introduces IoTECS, a domain-specific language designed to generate edge-to-cloud simulators for testing large-scale IoT systems, addressing the challenge of scalable testing in IoT development.

Contribution

It presents IoTECS, a novel DSL for creating scalable IoT edge-to-cloud simulators, developed in collaboration with industry, and evaluates its practical utility.

Findings

IoTECS enables scalable simulation of IoT systems.

The DSL was successfully implemented using Xtext.

Empirical evaluation shows its effectiveness in testing IoT applications.

Abstract

The Internet of things (IoT) is increasingly prevalent in domains such as emergency response, smart cities and autonomous vehicles. Simulation plays a key role in the testing of IoT systems, noting that field testing of a complete IoT product may be infeasible or prohibitively expensive. In this paper, we propose a domain-specific language (DSL) for generating edge-to-cloud simulators. An edge-to-cloud simulator executes the functionality of a large array of edge devices that communicate with cloud applications. Our DSL, named IoTECS, is the result of a collaborative project with an IoT analytics company, Cheetah Networks. The industrial use case that motivates IoTECS is ensuring the scalability of cloud applications by putting them under extreme loads from IoT devices connected to the edge. We implement IoTECS using Xtext and empirically evaluate its usefulness. We further reflect on the lessons learned.