LinkLab: A Scalable and Heterogeneous Testbed for Remotely Developing and Experimenting IoT Applications

Developing and experimenting IoT applications are still difficult and time-consuming, mainly due to their heterogeneous hardware and diverse software. Testbeds are useful for developers to test the performance of IoT applications before deploying them to the fields. In this paper, we present LinkLab (http://linklab.emnets.org), a scalable IoT testbed for heterogeneous devices. Compared with existing IoT testbeds, LinkLab not only supports running experiments but also supports remote development via a web-based IDE and remote compiling. Therefore, LinkLab is able to improve the efficiency of the developing-experimenting-optimizing loop for IoT developers. By using a distributed architecture, LinkLab is a scalable, multi-site, and multi-user IoT testbed, with fine-grained access control and a flexible naming mechanism. Further, an incremental online compilation and a multi-user cache techniques are used to speed up the cross compilation process. LinkLab is implemented with more than 150 IoT devices and evaluated by case studies, micro-benchmarks, and real experiments. Results show that LinkLab achieves convenient application development, efficient online compilation, and robust device management under various evaluation settings.