Architectures and experiences in testing IoT communications

A typical architecture for Internet of Things (IoT) systems consist of simple embedded systems (e.g., sensor nodes), collecting data, connected to a more traditional backend system providing end-user services. In our experience, compared to more general software testing, the most specific element in IoT testing is that of highly distributed and dynamic communication of IoT nodes, such as sensors. Further challenges for IoT reliability testing come from the architectural elements of IoT gateways connecting the devices to the networks, and the networks themselves which can host all other type of traffic at the same time. In this paper, we describe our experiences with these different aspects of IoT communications testing, and related test architectures.