The Internet of Things (IoT) connects a plethora of smart devices globally across various applications like smart cities, autonomous vehicles, and health monitoring. Simulation plays a key role in the testing of IoT systems, noting that field testing of a complete IoT product may be infeasible or prohibitively expensive. This paper addresses a specific yet important need in simulation-based testing for IoT: Stress testing of cloud systems that are increasingly employed in IoT applications. Existing stress testing solutions for IoT demand significant computational resources, making them ill-suited and costly. We propose a lean simulation framework designed for IoT cloud stress testing. The framework enables efficient simulation of a large array of IoT and edge devices that communicate with the cloud. To facilitate simulation construction for practitioners, we develop a domain-specific language (DSL) , named IoTECS , for generating simulators from model-based specifications. We provide the syntax and semantics of IoTECS and implement IoTECS using Xtext and Xtend. We assess simulators generated from IoTECS specifications for stress testing two real-world systems: a cloud-based IoT monitoring system developed by our industry partner and an IoT-connected vehicle system. Our empirical results indicate that simulators created using IoTECS : (1) achieve best performance when configured with Docker containerization; (2) effectively assess the service capacity of our case-study systems, and (3) outperform industrial stress-testing baseline tools, JMeter and Locust, by a factor of 3.5 in terms of the number of IoT and edge devices they can simulate using identical hardware resources. To gain initial insights about the usefulness of IoTECS in practice, we interviewed two engineers from our industry partner who have firsthand experience with IoTECS . Feedback from these interviews suggests that IoTECS is effective in stress testing IoT cloud systems, saving significant time and effort.

中文翻译：

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用于压力测试物联网云系统的精益模拟框架


物联网 (IoT) 连接全球众多智能设备，涵盖智能城市、自动驾驶汽车和健康监测等各种应用。模拟在物联网系统测试中发挥着关键作用，值得注意的是，对完整物联网产品进行现场测试可能不可行或成本过高。本文解决了基于模拟的物联网测试的一个特定但重要的需求：对物联网应用中越来越多地采用的云系统进行压力测试。现有的物联网压力测试解决方案需要大量的计算资源，因此不适合且成本高昂。我们提出了一个专为物联网云压力测试而设计的精益模拟框架。该框架能够有效模拟大量与云通信的物联网和边缘设备。为了方便从业者进行仿真构建，我们开发了一种名为 IoTECS 的特定领域语言 (DSL)，用于根据基于模型的规范生成仿真器。我们提供 IoTECS 的语法和语义，并使用 Xtext 和 Xtend 实现 IoTECS。我们评估根据 IoTECS 规范生成的模拟器，用于对两个现实系统进行压力测试：由我们的行业合作伙伴开发的基于云的物联网监控系统和物联网连接的车辆系统。我们的实证结果表明，使用 IoTECS 创建的模拟器：(1) 在配置 Docker 容器化时实现最佳性能； (2) 有效评估我们案例研究系统的服务能力，(3) 在可模拟的物联网和边缘设备数量方面，其性能优于工业压力测试基线工具 JMeter 和 Locust，达 3.5 倍相同的硬件资源。 为了初步了解 IoTECS 在实践中的实用性，我们采访了来自行业合作伙伴的两位具有 IoTECS 第一手经验的工程师。这些采访的反馈表明，IoTECS 在压力测试物联网云系统方面非常有效，节省了大量时间和精力。