LEAN: A Multi-Cell Smart City Simulator for the Massive Internet of Things Medium Access Control Layer

Abstract

We develop a multi-cell smart city simulator called LEAN that is targeted at the development and testing of Medium Access Control (MAC) layer protocols for massive Internet of Things (mIoT). Our simulator supports any number of cells each of which is centered around an IoT gateway over any geographic area which is displayed on a Graphical User Interface (GUI). In addition to all of the static IoT devices that appear on the GUI our simulator keeps track of the associations of all mobile IoT devices across time and furnishes these associations to any back-end MAC protocol that is developed in the simulation environment. In contrast with general-purpose smart city simulators LEAN has relatively low time and space complexity in the number of IoT devices and is well-suited for quick testing of novel MAC protocols for massive IoT. © 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.