A Low Cost Open Platform for Development and Performance Evaluation of IoT and IIoT Systems

The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm is nowadays perva- sive in a variety of applications. Distributed computing, i.e., local pro- cessing of data inside IoT nodes is mandatory to reduce power consump- tion and data communication cost, too. An evaluation of the needed computing power and of the hardware requirements is then as much use- ful as it is conducted in an early stage of the product development. The possibility to perform on-the-field experiments at an early stage is a de- sirable feature, too. In this paper, a low cost and open system for IoT evaluation is described. It contains basic blocks of an IoT/IIoT system, and software and hardware structures aimed to assess its performances with negligible overhead. Power consumption and timing characteristics of firmware (MCU) and hardware (FPGA) IoT nodes components can be collected and analyzed, to obtain real system requirements.