STGen: A Novel Lightweight IoT Testbed for Generating Sensor Traffic for the Experimentation of IoT Protocol and its Application in Hybrid Network

TL;DR

STGen addresses the need for scalable, low-cost IoT protocol experimentation by delivering a lightweight, hybrid WSN testbed that couples a distributed emulated sensor network with a physical STGen Core sink and real-time ELK analytics. Its modular architecture supports CLI, GUI, and REST/OpenAPI control, enabling rapid deployment and reproducible experiments on commodity hardware. The system demonstrates substantial advantages over existing platforms in startup time and memory footprint, with empirical results showing fast initialisation and low CPU load for thousands of nodes. The work enables researchers and students to prototype and validate IoT protocols and applications, with practical impact in facilitating big-data analytics integration and future cloud-based deployments.

Abstract

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a network that does not rely on a fixed infrastructure and consists of numerous sensors, such as temperature, humidity, GPS, and cameras, equipped with onboard processors that manage and monitor the environment in a specific area. As a result, building a real sensor network testbed for verifying, validating, or experimenting with a newly designed protocol presents considerable challenges in adapting a laboratory scenario due to the significant financial and logistical barriers, such as the need for specialized hardware and large-scale deployments. Additionally, WSN suffers from severe constraints such as restricted power supply, short communication range, limited bandwidth availability, and restricted memory storage. Addressing these challenges, this work presents a flexible testbed solution named STGen that enables researchers to experiment with IoT protocols in a hybrid environment that emulates WSN implementations with the physical Internet through a dedicated physical server named STGen core, which receives sensor traffic and processes it for further actions. The STGen testbed is lightweight in memory usage and easy to deploy. Most importantly, STGen supports large-scale distributed systems, facilitates experimentation with IoT protocols, and enables integration with back-end services for big data analytics and statistical insights. The key feature of STGen is the integration of real-world IoT protocols and their applications with WSN. Its modular and lightweight design makes STGen efficient and enables it to outperform other popular testbeds, such as Gotham and GothX, reducing memory usage by 89\%. While GothX takes approximately 26 minutes to establish a large topology with four VM nodes and 498 Docker nodes, STGen requires only 1.645 seconds to initialize the platform with 500 sensor nodes.

Figures (10)

• Figure 1: Hybrid model of STGen testbed integrating an emulated WSN with a sink node, enabling remote clients to receive IoT traffic via the public internet.
• Figure 2: Sequence diagram of STGen testbed illustrating client applications requesting the STGen Core Node with sensor metadata and receiving sensor data over a custom application layer protocol. The STGen core node collects sensor data from the testbed at configurable intervals, stores it in a cloud database, and forwards it to the ELK Stack for real-time traffic analysis.
• Figure 3: The STGen OpenAPI definition displayed in the Swagger UI (/swagger-ui/index.html).
• Figure 4: Distributed STGen testbed setup for experimenting with various IoT protocols and big data analytics on sensor data. Emulated testbeds feed sensor data to the STGen Core, which processes and provides real-time traffic analysis via the ELK Stack. Client applications access data using a custom UDP protocol, with sensor data backed up to a MongoDB cloud database.
• Figure 7: Performance Analysis of the STGen Platform Under Varying Sensor Node Configurations