Simulation of the Internet of Things

This paper presents main concepts and issues concerned with the simulation of Internet of Things (IoT). The heterogeneity of possible scenarios, arising from the massive deployment of an enormous amount of sensors and devices, imposes the use of sophisticated modeling and simulation techniques. In fact, the simulation of IoT introduces several issues from both quantitative and qualitative aspects. We discuss novel simulation techniques to enhance scalability and to permit the real-time execution of massively populated IoT environments (e.g., large-scale smart cities). In particular, we claim that agent-based, adaptive Parallel and Distributed Simulation (PADS) approaches are needed, together with multi-level simulation, which provide means to perform highly detailed simulations, on demand. We present a use case concerned with the simulation of smart territories.