The Fragile Edge: Chaos Engineering for Reliable IoT

Chaos engineering is a great way of detecting possible failures in loT devices. This technology has evolved well for testing cloud failure, but open source communities are still working towards building an efficient chaos engineering toolkit for testing loT devices.

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Billions of devices around the world today are connected to the internet, performing a variety of tasks in real time. According to IoT Analytics, the total number of IoT devices worldwide is expected to exceed 21 billion by 2025.

While the number of IoT devices continues to grow, they remain vulnerable to malfunctions. Most IoT devices use basic microcontrollers with only a few megabytes of memory. A smart thermostat worth a few hundred rupees has very little processing power. This limits it to handling only a few tasks at a time. As a result, these devices often fail when they encounter unexpected operating conditions.

Network instability makes IoT systems even more difficult to manage. Edge devices often rely on WiFi, Bluetooth, cellular networks or LoRaWAN -- a low power wireless technology that connects devices over long distances while using very little power. These networks are not always reliable, particularly in remote areas or congested cities. For instance, a smart doorbell may momentarily lose connectivity. In large industrial setups, millions of devices can experience disconnections, lost data packets and delays in communication. These are network disruptions. Studies show that in real world IoT systems, up to 5-15% of data packets can be lost. Latency can vary from milliseconds to several seconds depending on conditions. These factors make the smooth operation of IoT systems challenging.