Internet of Things Systems Testing

By 2020 it has been estimated that there could be anywhere between 20 billion and 100 billion connected devices as the Internet of Things comes to fruition.

How effectively these devices communicate over heavily congested networks will determine whether they succeed or fail so testing their network resilience is essential.

Clearly one option to ensure IoT systems will work effectively in real-work networks is to conduct pre-deployment testing using network emulation technology.

However, traditional network emulators require a dedicated physical port for each connected device under test so in order to realistically replicate even a small-scale realistic IoT proof-of-concept environment is going to call for the use of large multi-port network emulators which could be prohibitively expensive.

In contrast, NE-ONE Enterprise Network Emulators, with their unique Port Virtualization capability can easily recreate realistic virtual test networks in which potentially hundreds of devices can be connected using just a limited number of physical ports.

They achieve this by partitioning each physical port into a number of smaller virtual ports so that many devices can be tested sharing the same port. This makes them ideal to testing IoT environments where typically the devices only require relatively low network bandwidth to communicate small amounts of data but there are lots of devices all transmitting data at the same time, placing significant demand on the network environment.