Pseudo-dynamic testing of realistic edge-fog cloud ecosystems

© 1979-2012 IEEE. Currently, our society is undergoing a radical change due to the increasing pervasive use of ICT within all of its processes. Such an evolution has been triggered by the advent of the Internet of Things vision, where smart sensing devices can be integrated in the daily objects surrounding any human being. The increasing demand of dealing with the big data generated, managed, and stored by the applications built on top of such novel sensory networks has called for innovative architectures, such as edge and fog computing, which have not yet been fully standardized. Considering the large scale and complexity of these architectures, testing a software artifact to be deployed in the nodes composing an edge-fog ecosystem could be extremely challenging. Pure simulated environments and real testbeds could be not representative enough of realistic scenarios or unacceptably expensive. We explore such issues and present a pseudo-dynamic testing approach, where a portion of the experimental scenario is simulated, while the edge and fog nodes under test are emulated or executed in a real environment.