Toward Future Internet of Things Experimentation and Evaluation

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) and its current Internet engineering task force and IEEE dual stack model have been facing limitations, requiring applications to overcome tough constraints by their own, narrowing the full potential of this concept. For instance, the IoT dual stack model does not entirely address or support perennial naming, immutable data provenance, data accountability, mobility support, and services’ self-organization. On the other hand, future Internet architecture (FIA) research emerges as a viable candidate to compensate these gaps through evolutionary and revolutionary efforts. Regardless of the FIA proposal model, this field lacks a suitable environment that enables the performance experimentation and evaluation of distinct protocols and architectures fairly and transparently. This article proposes a novel IoT experimentation and evaluation environment based on a low-cost and open-source solution. The proposed environment integrates technologies of containers, IoT nodes emulation, and network simulation to evaluate the current IoT dual stack and a promising FIA approach called eXpressive Internet architecture. Moreover, this work combines the mentioned disjointed technologies, exploiting Docker containers, Contiki open-source operational system for IoT, and Cooja the IoT network simulator. In this way, it addresses the objective of fostering an honest experimentation and evaluation environment for FIAs. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of this approach, broadening this field and sowing a path to work with other FIAs.