A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a network that does not rely on a fixed infrastructure and consists of numerous sensors, such as temperature, humidity, GPS, and cameras, equipped with onboard processors that manage and monitor the environment in a specific area. As a result, building a real sensor network testbed for verifying, validating, or experimenting with a newly designed protocol presents considerable challenges in adapting a laboratory scenario due to the significant financial and logistical barriers, such as the need for specialized hardware and large-scale deployments. Additionally, WSN suffers from severe constraints such as restricted power supply, short communication range, limited bandwidth availability, and restricted memory storage. Addressing these challenges, this work presents a flexible testbed solution named STGen that enables researchers to experiment with IoT protocols in a hybrid environment that emulates WSN implementations with the physical Internet through a dedicated physical server named STGen core, which receives sensor traffic and processes it for further actions. The STGen testbed is lightweight in memory usage and easy to deploy. Most importantly, STGen supports large-scale distributed systems, facilitates experimentation with IoT protocols, and enables integration with back-end services for big data analytics and statistical insights. The key feature of STGen is the integration of real-world IoT protocols and their applications with WSN. Its modular and lightweight design makes STGen efficient and enables it to outperform other popular testbeds, such as Gotham and GothX, reducing memory usage by 89\%. While GothX takes approximately 26 minutes to establish a large topology with four VM nodes and 498 Docker nodes, STGen requires only 1.645 seconds to initialize the platform with 500 sensor nodes.

翻译：无线传感器网络（WSN）是一种不依赖固定基础设施的网络，由大量传感器（如温度、湿度、GPS和摄像头传感器）组成，这些传感器配备板载处理器，用于管理和监测特定区域的环境。因此，由于需要专用硬件和大规模部署等显著的财务与物流障碍，为验证、确认或实验新设计的协议而构建真实的传感器网络测试平台，在适应实验室场景方面面临巨大挑战。此外，WSN还受到严重限制，如电源供应受限、通信距离短、可用带宽有限以及内存存储空间不足。为应对这些挑战，本研究提出了一种名为STGen的灵活测试平台解决方案。该平台使研究人员能够在混合环境中进行物联网协议实验，通过一个名为STGen核心的专用物理服务器，模拟WSN实现与物理互联网的集成。该服务器接收传感器流量并对其进行处理以执行后续操作。STGen测试平台在内存使用上具有轻量级特性且易于部署。最重要的是，STGen支持大规模分布式系统，便于进行物联网协议实验，并能与后端服务集成以支持大数据分析和统计洞察。STGen的关键特性在于将真实世界的物联网协议及其应用与WSN相集成。其模块化与轻量化设计使STGen运行高效，性能优于其他主流测试平台（如Gotham和GothX），内存使用量降低89%。当GothX建立包含四个虚拟机节点和498个Docker节点的大型拓扑约需26分钟时，STGen仅需1.645秒即可完成500个传感器节点的平台初始化。