Building a Simulation-in-the-loop Sensor Data Testbed for Cloud-enabled Pervasive Applications

When experimenting with pervasive systems consisting of numerous intercommunicating machines and sensors, it quickly becomes desirable to mix simulated virtual nodes and real world machines. This will enable the implementation of a test-bed where a large number of simulated nodes, instead of a potentially very expensive set of real prototype devices, are interacting with a smaller number of physical devices through real world physical network hardware. Such setups are referred to as “simulation-in-the-loop” systems, where it is possible to send and receive simulator generated packets on real world devices. This approach will also inherently ensure a certain degree of validity and realism of the simulation models as packets generated within the simulator must travel through a real network and be successfully received by a physical machine which, ideally, has no way of knowing if the packet originated from a simulated node or a real one. In this paper, we are presenting the design principles for an interconnected test-bed system for trialing the data handling capabilities of cloud-enabled sensor systems