A Preliminary Study On Network Testbed For Experiments Of The Internet Of Things

Since clearly proposed in1999, the Internet of Things (IOT) has brought a boom in research and application worldwide. However, in terms of a new direction of development of the network, there is no suitable experimental test platform for the IOT. Typically, the development and testing of network systems and distributed applications are carried out in the network testbed, which provides the closest test environment to the application scenario combining software and hardware. However, it is impractical or inefficient to directly conduct experiments of in the existing network testbeds. Traditional network communication mainly refers to communications between people while the IOT extends traditional network communication to communications between man and machine or from machine to machine. Meanwhile, the number of sensors determines that the testbed scale of the IOT is much larger than the traditional network testbed. Therefore, the IOT requires extended network testbed to effectively support the experiment.Combining the latest theory of the IOT and network testbed, this paper designs and implements a prototype network testbed for the IOT experiments. In terms of architecture, this paper regards the experimental platform of the IOT as an expansion of the basic environment of network testbed. We add front-end servers in the control network and add experimental-support for a variety of popular sensors in the experimental network. In the lifecycle of an experiment, users can remotely select equipment and start and configure the experimental nodes. We also extend the testbed with an energy-monitoring module. At last, we design a preservation system for the gateways of the IOT.We re-implement several common used scenarios of the IOT simulation on our testbed. Our results show the feasibility, generality and energy saving of our testbed. This paper provides a basis for the study of simulation of the IOT in a uniform platform.