Service Virtualisation of Internet-of-Things Devices: Techniques and Challenges
This addresses the need for efficient testing in IoT development, but it is incremental as it focuses on adapting existing enterprise methods.
The paper tackles the problem of adapting service virtualization techniques from enterprise environments to Internet-of-Things (IoT) contexts to accelerate application development by enabling automated testing without physical devices, by examining structural differences between IoT and enterprise protocols and identifying key technical challenges.
Service virtualization is an approach that uses virtualized environments to automatically test enterprise services in production-like conditions. Many techniques have been proposed to provide such a realistic environment for enterprise services. The Internet-of-Things (IoT) is an emerging field which connects a diverse set of devices over different transport layers, using a variety of protocols. Provisioning a virtual testbed of IoT devices can accelerate IoT application development by enabling automated testing without requiring a continuous connection to the physical devices. One solution is to expand existing enterprise service virtualization to IoT environments. There are various structural differences between the two environments that should be considered to implement appropriate service virtualization for IoT. This paper examines the structural differences between various IoT protocols and enterprise protocols and identifies key technical challenges that need to be addressed to implement service virtualization in IoT environments.