Foundations for Simulating IoT Control Mechanisms with a Chemical Analogy

The emergence of IoT systems introduced new kind of challenges for the designers of such large scale highly distributed systems. The sheer number of participating devices raises a crucial question: how they can be coordinated. Engineers often opt for using a simulator to evaluate new approaches or scenarios in various environments. This raises the second crucial question: how such a large system can be simulated efficiently. Existing simulators (even if they are IoT focused) are often focused on some particular scenarios and not capable to evaluate coordination approaches. In this paper we propose a chemical coordination model and a new extension to the DISSECT-CF cloud simulator. We expect that their combination on one hand ensures a distributed adaptive coordination on the other hand allows the separation of simulation problems into manageable sizes; these enable the analysis of large scale IoT systems with decentralized coordination approaches.