Design, code generation and simulation of IoT environments with mobility devices by using model-driven development: SimulateIoT-Mobile

Abstract

Systems based on the Internet of Things (IoT) are continuously growing in many areas such as smart cities, home environments, buildings, agriculture, industry, etc. Device mobility is one of the key aspects of these IoT systems, but managing it could be a challenge. Mobility exposes the IoT environment or Industrial IoT (IIoT) to situations such as packet loss, increased delay or jitter, dynamism in the network topology, new security threats, etc. In addition, there is no standard for mobility management for the most commonly used IoT protocols, such as MQTT or CoAP. Consequently, managing IoT mobility is a hard, error-prone and tedious task. However, increasing the abstraction level from which the IoT systems are designed helps to tackle the underlying technology complexity. In this regard, Model-driven development approaches can help to both reduce the IoT application time to market and tackle the technological complexity to develop IoT applications. In this paper, a Domain-Specific Language based on SimulateIoT is proposed for the design, code generation and simulation of IoT systems with mobility management for the MQTT protocol. The IoT systems generated integrate the sensors, actuators, fog nodes, cloud nodes and the architecture that supports mobility, which are deployed as microservices on Docker containers and composed suitability. Finally, two case studies focused on animal tracking and a Personal mobility device (PMD) based on bicycles IoT systems are presented to show the IoT solutions deployed.