IoTbed: A Generic Architecture for Testbed as a Service for Internet of Things-Based Systems

In recent years, the concept of the Internet of Things (IoT) has already been implemented in numerous application domains, such as smart city, intelligent healthcare assistant, and smart transportation management. Researchers or developers associated with these domains frequently require diverse types of IoT devices to implement or test their IoT related innovations. However, building an IoT-testbed by purchasing these IoT devices in every few months is infeasible considering that most of them will be used only for a small amount of time and will become obsolete with the arrival of an upgraded version of those devices. Instead, a better approach would be rented out the IoT devices in on-demand, just-in-time, and pay for only the time the devices are used basis. Therefore, in this paper, we propose IoTbed - an architecture to deliver a large scale Testbed as a service using the IoT devices located in the users' proximal networks. IoTbed enables testbed providers to build their testbeds in the edge of the network and allows easy and secure access for IoT service providers to run experiments on those testbeds. IoTbed presents an economic model that offers monetary incentives to the device owners for using their devices in the testbed experiments. We posit that such an incentive model will encourage more testbed providers to rent out their smart devices through IoTbed. To demonstrate the feasibility of IoTbed, we implemented a prototype of IoTbed to run on Contiki powered IoT devices and evaluated the performance.