MobIoTSim: Towards a Mobile IoT Device Simulator

Currently a growing number of powerful devices join the Internet composing a world of smart devices, or things in the Internet of Things (IoT) perspective, significantly impacting the global traffic. There are also more and more cloud providers offering IoT-specific services, since cloud computing has the potential to satisfy IoT needs such as hiding data generation, processing and visualization tasks. Using the capabilities of smartphones, many things can be simulated simultaneously supporting most types of IoT devices. In this paper, we discuss the design and development of a mobile IoT simulator called MobIoTSim that helps researchers to learn IoT device handling without buying real sensors, and to test and demonstrate IoT applications utilizing multiple devices. We also show how to develop a gateway service in a cloud that can be connected to MobIoTSim to manage the simulated devices and to send back notifications by responding to critical sensor values. By using this tool, developers can examine the behaviour of IoT systems, and develop and evaluate IoT cloud applications more efficiently.