SimulateIoT-FIWARE: Domain Specific Language to Design, Code Generation and Execute IoT Simulation Environments on FIWARE

Systems based on the Internet of Things (IoT) are continuously growing in many areas such as smart cities, home environments, buildings, agriculture, industry, etc. This system integrates heterogeneous technologies into a complex architecture of interconnected devices capable of communicating, processing, analysing or storing data. There are several IoT platforms that offer several capabilities for the development of these systems. Some of these platforms are Google Cloud’s IoT Platform, Microsoft Azure IoT suite, ThingSpeak IoT Platform, Thingworx 8 IoT Platform or FIWARE. However, they are complex IoT platforms where each IoT solution has to be developed ad-hoc and implemented by developers by hand. Consequently, developing IoT solutions is a hard, error-prone and tedious task. Thus, increase the abstraction level from which the IoT systems are designed helps to tackle the underlying technology complexity. In this sense, model-driven development approaches can help to both reduce the IoT application time to market and tackle the technological complexity to develop IoT applications. In this paper, we propose a Domain-Specific Language based on SimulateIoT for the design, code generation and simulation of IoT systems which could be deployed on FIWARE infrastructure (an open-source IoT platform). This implies not only designing the IoT system for a high abstraction level and later on code generation, but also designing and deploying an additional simulation layer to simulate the system on the FIWARE infrastructure before final deployment. The FIWARE IoT environment generated includes the sensors, actuators, fog nodes, cloud nodes and analytical characteristics, which are deployed as microservices on Docker containers and composed suitability to obtain a service-oriented architecture. Finally, two case studies focused on a smart building and an agricultural IoT environment are presented to show the IoT solutions deployed using FIWARE.