Challenges in the Design of an IoT Testbed

Testbeds are crucial at various stages of engineering of a product. With the trending IoT industry, testbeds for IoT products are being widely discussed in literature. Testbeds for academics, however, have different requirements as compared to the testbeds for industry. Testbeds for academic usage need to be flexible enough to support heterogeneous sensors, heterogeneous protocols and modification of protocols, while maintaining a controlled & repeatable environment for the experiments. In this paper, the authors discuss the challenges in the development of an IoT based smart building testbed for academics. The design of a flexible testbed that supports research and development of various design components, namely network communication protocols, application use cases, cognition and security, of a smart building is presented. The demonstration setup of this testbed for indoor environment monitoring, along with sample visualizations is also presented.