A Mobile IoT Device Simulator for IoT-Fog-Cloud Systems

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the latest trend of the current ICT evolution, represented by a huge amount of powerful smart devices that have started to appear on the Internet. By responding to this new trend, many cloud providers have started to offer services for IoT management. Recent advances have already shown that cloud computing can be used to serve IoT needs by performing data generation, processing and visualization tasks. In this currently forming ecosystem, IoT system developers need to purchase, connect and configure these devices, and they also have to choose the right infrastructure provider offering the combination of protocols and data structures fitting their applications. In this paper, we propose a complex, semi-simulation environment that aims to provide a solution for these IoT challenges. Our main contribution is the the design of an Android-based, mobile IoT device simulator called MobIoTSim. We also propose a customizable cloud gateway to manage these devices by receiving, processing and visualizing sensor data coming from MobIoTSim. To be as close as possible to real world application, we created an IoT trace archive service called SUMMON, which can be used to gather real-world sensor data, which can be used by MobIoTSim. Finally, we demonstrate how to create IoT applications utilizing numerous IoT devices with this environment, and evaluate the device management scalability and responsiveness of its components.