Security is one of the major concerns of the IoT Manager applications. Keeping this in mind, we built the manager applications with different level of security. IoT Network Simulator is enhanced to support all manager applications based on their security practices. Similar to the previous version, the simulator supports all its options from the user interface itself.
The User interface will provide options based on the IoT applications. For example Azure IoT hub supports SAS Token and Certificate based authentication. Users will be able to create a specific network for the Azure IoT core and able to create devices that handshakes with the IoT hub based on the details specified when configuring the device. Similarly, this is possible for the AWS IOT as well.
Simulating IoT Network for Other Manager applications
For all other manager applications like Bevywise IoT Platform, Losant , and others, you will be able to specify a single certificate at the common settings page and get your devices connected to the manager application.
Device-level SSL Security
Azure IoT / AWS IoT manages every device to have a unique certificate. In addition, the IoT Network simulator supports the configuration of the root Certificate in the settings window and ensures that you specify each and every client certificate in the device configuration screen. The WILL, QoS, retain event messages and command messages configuration is the same as before.
Individual Device IP Address
The simulator runs on a single machine and simulates all its devices. But, The manager will be seeing all the devices from one Host (IP Address). This contradicts the real-time Simulation. In order to overcome this, the 2.0 version has added support for using Virtual IP Addresses. By this functionality, each simulated device will connect to the manager application from a different host Address.
Today we are happy to introduce iot templates & bulk device creation in IOT Simulator.
We believe that the real effort of any validation process. You have to spend the efforts on the validating and analysing the result data and not on setting up the environment. Hence, IOT environment needs a mass network setup to test and demo the manager applications and test interoperability of devices.
IOT Templates
With the new update, you will be able to now spend very little time to just create a template. The template supports specifying a replaceable place holders strings using the client names. Besides that, The template definition allows you to add place holders in WILL Topic, subscription topics, publishing topics and topics used in behavior pattern.
You can also use pattern in the Data. However, the IOT simulator already supports dynamic values for the text and JSON based messages. Besides that You will be able to create tens of thousands of unique devices with unique topic and messages within a few minutes.
Multiple Simulated Networks
The validation of the manager application process have multiple process. However, we need to review different functional implementation, performance, etc. Keeping this in mind, we have added options to store multiple simulated networks. These networks can be persisted and reused on demand.
Bevywise IoT Simulator is a Free, highly scalable IoT Device Simulation suite that helps you simulate various scenarios needed for developing , testing and demonstrating realtime devices and managers. You can create a simulated IoT device simply from the user interface.
There are three major requirement under which the IoT Devices M2M communication can be grouped. They are:
— Failover & Redundancy
— Data Collection
— Activate Edge Actions
This article explains how we can simulate IoT Devices. The simulated IoT Device can be used along with your real devices to act as one of the missing edge devices to have a complete test environment.
IOT Device Failover & Redundancy:
Any redundancy set up needs a master and standby device. We need to propagate the IoT failure of the master to the standby device. In our scenario, we connect the master and the standby device to the broker and the standby will subscribe to the status of the master device. The broker will notify the standby device when the master goes off for the standby device to take over. This scenario can be done using two simulated IoT device.
Take an example of the Diesel Generator of a large facility. It has a master and a standby generator. The master should register a WILL Topic and message to the broker and the standby generator should subscribe to the will topic of the master. When the master Diesel generator goes down, the broker will send the message to the interested clients.
You should configure a WILL Message with a topic /facility/dg_master_status with a Open DOWN which the broker publishes on disconnect of the device.
The DG-Standby should listen to the master status and do the necessary action. This requires two kinds of action.
— Getting the Standby up and serve the need.
— Sending the status to the Facility manager.
The DB Standby should be configured with a subscription for the Will topic of the master /facility/dg_master_status . So whenever the DG Master is down, the DG Standby will receive a message to take action. The following video helps you with the subscription to the necessary topics.
As this is the simulated Standby The standby DG we need to also publish a messages saying that the Slave DB is UP. So when the DG Slave receives a messages of master down, it publishes a slave status active. You can achieve this via the Request Response..
Request Topic & Message – DG_Standby :/facility/dg_master_status : Down
Response Topic & Messages – /facility/dg_slave_status : Active
The following video helps you with the behaviour simulation.
Data Collection:
Every decision taken today is powered by the data. The perfect decision making needs a lot of time series data. This mandates the need for collecting data from the edge device for every second or minute based on the device.
You can configure IoT Simulator to send data continuously to the broker and the interested server every second. In Healthcare , health data is necessary to record and send every second. Let us now simulate a device that records and sends data to the manager application. We need to send a messages every few seconds for the monitors.
Every 5 second is the most possible time interval for sending data. You can configure time in a very much of a flexible pattern to send every minute or every hour or particular minute of every hour or particular second of every minute and more.
IoT Device Actions:
Sensors mostly work on the data collection. But You need to process these data and to take the necessary action. The IoT Platform gives you the flexibility to aggregate and process the data. The inference from this data can trigger messages to the edge devices which can trigger actions at the edge.
We can take water level sensor and a water pump switch as an example of how we can sense data as well as take actions. In this scenario, the water pump needs to be started when the level is low and needs to be stopped when the water level is high. The water pump will also publish the current status once the the status changes. We can configure this scenario using the Event publishing and behaviour simulator as shown in the previous videos.
Hope this article helped you simulate your own IoT Device using the IoT Simulator. Do feel free to write to us if you need any assistance with your device. We do have a few advanced options like Intercepting and customisation of messages and API Control which we will talk in detail in our next article.
Download the IoT Simulator for FREE now to create your own simulated IOT device that mimics your real devices.
We have been working hard to make the simulation tools more comfortable for the testers and development professionals. Hence, we enhanced Windows MQTT Simulator to help you simulate MQTT Devices to develop , test & demo real world MQTT Brokers and MQTT Devices. Previously we had support only for the Linux and MAC operating Systems. But With this version, the Simulator can be used in windows 7 , 8 & 10 and Server . The highlights of version 2 are:
Windows MQTT Simulator
The simulator can now run on 32 bit and 64 bit windows Operating System in addition to already support Linux and Mac.
Controlled Simulation with Simulator API
You can automate to run Windows MQTT Simulator on a test bed and can be remotely controlled using the API. In addition You can dynamically create a new MQTT Device and connect to your broker under test , you can send new messages from an existing client , and more with the new API. The pre build clients for Python can be downloaded from here.
Enhanced Performance & Stability
This update brings a lot of fixes and performance enhancements to the simulator. The simulator takes the CSV (colon separated values) as input to simulate the devices.
You can simulate more than tens of thousands of devices in a single machine. However with the beta 2 version of the simulator you can simulate up to 2000 clients in both subscribers and publishers. Download the Windows MQTT Simulator.
Please feel free to write your queries and suggestions to support.
