Scalable and Interactive Simulation for IoT Applications with TinySim

Modern IoT applications are characterized by three important features, i.e., the device heterogeneity, the long-range communication and the cloud-device integration. The above features cause difficulties for IoT application developers in predicting and evaluating the performance of the entire system. To tackle the above difficulties, we design and implement an IoT simulator, TinySim, which satisfies the requirements of high fidelity, high scalability, and high interactivity. Many virtual IoT devices can be simulated by TinySim at the PC end. These IoT devices can send or receive messages from the cloud or smartphones, making it possible for the developers to evaluate the entire system without the actual IoT hardware. We connect TinySim with Unity 3D to provide high interactivity. We design an approximation-based approach to reduce the amount of simulation events, greatly speeding up the simulation process. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the performance of TinySim. Results show that TinySim can achieve high accuracy with an error ratio lower than 9.52% in terms of energy and latency. Further, TinySim can simulate 4,000 devices within 11.2 physical-minutes for 10 simulation-minutes, which is about 3× faster than the state-of-art approach.