A Mininet-Based Emulated Testbed for the I/Ocloud

Considering the proliferation of smart devices connected to the Internet, typically going under the aegis of Internet of Things (IoT), a trend has arisen to promote the Cloud paradigm as a suitable management system for such a complex environment. In this context, an effort to extend the OpenStack ecosystem to make it able to support the management of the IoT infrastructure has been made by virtue of the I/Ocloud approach, leading up to its reference implementation, the Stack4Things (S4T) middleware. S4T provides a set of suitable capabilities and features to make the (remote) IoT devices able to join an edge-based IaaS/PaaS Cloud. In the interest of enhancing the S4T middleware scalability and explore new capabilities in particular, ones related to Fog and Edge paradigms, it is becoming a must to test new features in practice at a low financial cost and particular constraints for instance, number/type of devices, network conditions, etc. For this purpose, the use of network emulation tools is a practical and suitable approach. In this paper, we present an integration between the S4T middleware and an emulation tool namely Containernet. Through the integration approach, we model network conditions (e.g., latency, bandwidth, packet loss) and devices (in forms of containers) using Containernet, and we manage the devices (i.e., containers) by means of S4T.