EMU-IoT - A Virtual Internet of Things Lab

Internet-of-Things technologies are rapidly emerging as the cornerstone of modern digital life. IoT is the main driver for the increased "intelligence" in most aspects of everyday life: smart transportation, smart buildings, smart energy, smart health. Nevertheless, further progress and research are in danger of being slowed down. One important reason is the cost of infrastructure at scale. The difficulties in setting up very large IoT networks do not permit us to stress test the systems and argue about their performance and their durability. To tackle this problem, this work proposes EMU-IoT, a virtual lab for IoT technologies. Using virtualization and container technologies, we demonstrate an experimentation infrastructure to enable researchers and other practitioners to conduct large scale experiments and test several quality aspects of IoT systems with minimal requirements in devices and other equipment. In this paper, we show how easy and simple it is to set up experiments with EMU-IoT and we demonstrate the usefulness of EMU-IoT by conducting experiments in our lab.