Thomas Prantl

The proliferation of IoT devices is increasing at a fast pace, whether for private or business use. However,despite their growing popularity, their safe operation is often not guaranteed. To tackle the security challenges of modern IoT environments, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research is funding the SIMPL project in order to support research in this area. The contribution of this paper is to introduce the main goal, objectives, and key features of SIMPL

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 be used to simulate the behavior of real-world networks by adding artificial disturbance. However, existing network emulators often require a lot of technical knowledge and 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 base emulator is used 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 different network quality characteristics as well as emulating real-world network traces.