Contention Aware Web of Things Emulation Testbed

Since the advent of the Web, new Web benchmarking tools have frequently been introduced to keep up with evolving workloads and environments. The introduction of Web of Things (WoT) marks the beginning of another important paradigm that requires new benchmarking tools and testbeds. Such a WoT benchmarking testbed can enable the comparison of different WoT application configurations and workload scenarios under assumptions regarding WoT application resource demands and WoT device network characteristics. The powerful computational capabilities of modern commodity multicore servers along with the limited resource consumption footprints of WoT devices suggest the feasibility of a benchmarking testbed that can emulate the application behaviour of a large number of WoT devices on just a single multicore server. However, to obtain test results that reflect the true performance of the system being emulated, care must be exercised to detect and consider the impact of testbed bottlenecks on performance results. For example, if too many WoT devices are emulated then performance metrics obtained from a test run, e.g., WoT device response times, would only reflect contention among emulated devices for shared multicore server resources instead of providing a true indication of the performance of the WoT system being emulated. We develop a testbed that helps a user emulate a system consisting of multiple WoT devices on a single multicore server by exploiting Docker containers. Furthermore, we devise a novel mechanism for the user to check whether shared resource contention in the testbed has impacted the integrity of test results. Our solution allows for careful scaling of experiments and enables resource efficient evaluation of a wide range of WoT systems, architectures, application characteristics, workload scenarios, and network conditions.