imuLab: Internet of Things Simulation Platform Based on OpenStack and Container Technology

Abstract

To support next-generation services, IoT architectures are increasingly adopting emerging technologies to achieve the interconnection of everything, such as software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV). From a developer's perspective, wireless access is the core technology of the IoT device side. Although the testbed is an important research tool for experimental evaluation in this environment, the pattern of the Internet of Things testbed is fragmented. And testing new applications and network protocols in IoT systems is a difficult and time-consuming task. In this work, we aim to fill this gap by proposing imuLab (a simulation experiment platform for the Internet of Things). ImuLab bridges the functions of the existing emulator of the Internet of Things (ie VMNet), and combines OpenStack and container technology to evaluate and verify the research ideas about the IoT network protocol. Our research aims to build a test platform with scalability, portability, high reliability, and flexible deployment of multiple experimental solutions at a reasonable cost. The experimental results show that imuLab shows relatively good performance under limited resources.