Designing and simulating IoT environments by using a model-driven approach

Developing, deploying and testing IoT projects require high investments on devices, fog nodes, cloud nodes, analytic nodes, hardware and software. However, in order to decrease the cost associated to develop and test the IoT system it can be previously simulated. In this regard, designing IoT simulation environments has been tackled focusing on low level aspects such as networks, motes and so on more than focusing on the high level concepts related to IoT environments. Model-driven development aims to develop the software systems from domain models which capture at high level the domain concepts and relationships, generating from them the software artefacts by using code-generators. In this paper, a model-driven development approach is applied to define, generate code and deploy IoT systems simulations. The IoT simulation environment generated from each model includes the sensors, actuators, fog nodes, cloud nodes and analytical characteristics. Additionally, a case study, focused on an Industrial IoT environment is presented to show the simulation expressiveness.