IoT platforms and services configuration through parameter sweep: a simulation-based approach

Due to their inherent cyber-physical features and high interactivity, IoT services exhibit performances which are simultaneously impacted by different orthogonal factors. Indeed, deployment settings (e.g., Cloud- or Edge-based scenarios, network bandwidth, hardware resource availability), algorithmic aspects (e.g., the specific algorithm used to solve a problem) and data features (e.g., packet size and rate) deeply affect the overall functioning of an IoT service and its compliance with specific requirements such as reactivity, reliability and efficiency. An accurate parameter sweep based on realistic IoT simulations is a viable, yet still unexplored, solution to obtain a full-fledged overview and specific evaluations about the performance of an IoT system under development. In such a direction, in this paper we present an approach for assessing Edge analytic in complex IoT scenarios through a parameter sweep analysis conducted through a simulation-based process, enabling a fine-grained modeling of hybrid IoT systems (both Cloud and Edge) of different scales (small, medium and large). Four typical IoT use cases (autonomous vehicles, smart healthcare, gaming, and industrial IoT) are presented to show the benefits of our approach in finding the right settings for configuring and running them. Indeed, the obtained results show that our approach concretely helps IoT developers in the challenging task of tuning the parameters' set so as to meet the given requirements, even in the case of large solution spaces and before the actual deployment phase.