Development of Wireless Emulator for Large-Scale IoT Applications

In this study, to evaluate large-scale IoT applications comprising numerous radio devices, we developed a wireless emulator that can evaluate various radio communication systems in cyberspace, without requiring actual radio devices, in addition to verifying transmission performance in an operation similar to actual operations. Because the wireless emulator can separately and independently operate each radio node by porting software that realizes protocols other than the physical layer on the actual radio device to the emulator, the software can be implemented in the actual radio device as it is after completing the emulation. Furthermore, in the emulator, the topology of the network can be altered freely in cyberspace. Moreover, because the simulation of the physical layer is analyzed independently in the emulator, various applications can be evaluated, regardless of mobile and fixed communications. In this study, the Wi-SUN FAN system was adopted as the evaluation example of the wireless communication system using this emulator, star and tree topologies with Wi-SUN FAN nodes were formed in cyberspace, and transmission characteristics, such as average packet transmission success rate and average delay time, were evaluated. The characteristics were compared with the computer simulation results without actual operations and were consistent.