IoTSim-Edge: A simulation framework for modeling the behavior of Internet of Things and edge computing environments

With the proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) and edge computing paradigms, billions of IoT devices are being networked to support data-driven and real-time decision making across numerous application domains, including smart homes, smart transport, and smart buildings. These ubiquitously distributed IoT devices send the raw data to their respective edge device (eg, IoT gateways) or the cloud directly. The wide spectrum of possible application use cases make the design and networking of IoT and edge computing layers a very tedious process due to the: (i) complexity and heterogeneity of end-point networks (eg, Wi-Fi, 4G, and Bluetooth); (ii) heterogeneity of edge and IoT hardware resources and software stack; (iv) mobility of IoT devices; and (iii) the complex interplay between the IoT and edge layers. Unlike cloud computing, where researchers and developers seeking to test capacity planning, resource selection, network configuration, computation placement, and security management strategies had access to public cloud infrastructure (eg, Amazon and Azure), establishing an IoT and edge computing testbed that offers a high degree of verisimilitude is not only complex, costly, and resource-intensive but also time-intensive. Moreover, testing in real IoT and edge computing environments is not feasible due to the high cost and diverse domain knowledge required in order to reason about their diversity, scalability, and usability. To support performance testing and validation of IoT and edge computing configurations and algorithms at scale, simulation frameworks should be developed. Hence, this article proposes a novel simulator IoTSim-Edge, which captures the behavior of heterogeneous IoT and edge computing infrastructure and allows users to test their infrastructure and framework in an easy and configurable manner. IoTSim-Edge extends the capability of CloudSim to incorporate the different features of edge and IoT devices. The effectiveness of IoTSim-Edge is described using three test cases. Results show the varying capability of IoTSim-Edge in terms of application composition, battery-oriented modeling, heterogeneous protocols modeling, and mobility modeling along with the resources provisioning for IoT applications.