ELIoT: Design of an emulated IoT platform

The constant and rapid evolution of hardware and software components, along with the proliferation of newer standards and technologies, makes the creation of IoT environments devoted to test purposes extremely complicated. In this work, we present the design of an IoT emulation platform (ELIoT), which aim on making the deployment of IoT test environments easier and more flexible. ELIoT provides support for well-known IoT protocols - e.g., Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) and Lightweight M2M (LWM2M) -, facilitating the study of interactions between different IoT entities. In order to make ELIoT easily portable and highly customizable, we exploit the lightweight and flexible characteristics of emerging virtualization technologies, such as Docker containers, for emulating both simple and complex IoT devices. A comprehensive performance evaluation aims to assess the feasibility of our implementation, by testing ELIoT scalability properties and other relevant performance metrics such as communication latency and throughput.