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

The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm is nowadays pervasive in a variety of applications. Distributed computing, i.e., local processing of data inside IoT nodes is mandatory to reduce power consumption and data communication cost, too. An evaluation of the needed computing power and of the hardware requirements is then as much useful 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 desirable 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.