An IoT Network Emulator for Analyzing the Influence of Varying Network Quality

IoT devices often communicate over wireless or cellular networks with varying connection quality. These fluctuations are caused, among others, by the free-space path loss (FSPL), buildings, topological obstacles, weather, and mobility of the receiver. Varying signal quality affects bandwidth, transmission delays, packet loss, and jitter. Mobile IoT applications exposed to varying connection characteristics have to handle such variations and take them into account during development and testing. However, tests in real mobile networks are complex and challenging to reproduce. Therefore, network emulators can simulate the behavior of real-world networks by adding artificial disturbance. However, existing network emulators often require a lot of technical knowledge and a complex setup. Integrating such emulators into automated software testing pipelines could be a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a framework for emulating IoT networks with varying quality characteristics. An existing emulator is used as a base and integrated into our framework enabling the user to utilize it without extensive network expertise and configuration effort. The evaluation proves that our framework can simulate a variety of network quality characteristics and emulate real-world network traces.