German enterprise MQTT company HiveMQ has announced Swarm so organisations of all sizes can reliably simulate and test large-scale IoT networks.

Swarm helps enterprises easily test the scalability and performance of their IoT deployments, resulting in increased quality and reliability. It provides global enterprises with a way to forecast capacity, infrastructure and financial cost planning prior to putting an IoT system into production.

“As IoT continues to grow in both scope and volume, the ability to test IoT for scale and performance becomes mission critical,” said Dominik Obermaier, CTO of HiveMQ. “We have extensive experience with some of the largest IoT systems in the world. These customers have asked us to help them validate their systems before going into production. Swarm meets these needs by enabling our enterprise customers to ensure their large-scale IoT systems perform to expectation the first time they’re deployed.”

The IoT is rapidly growing in use by enterprises across multiple industries, including manufacturing, logistics, healthcare and autonomous vehicles, so much so that the IoT market is on pace to grow to over $2.4tn annually by 2027, according to Business Insider. However, IoT systems are incredibly difficult to test prior to production. Emulating behaviour in a production environment is often unreliable and individual IoT devices can demonstrate multiple complex behaviour patterns.

For example, autonomous vehicles at rest behave very differently than those navigating the unexpected events they encounter in the real world, be it a highway or a factory floor. Despite these problems, load and stress testing is an unavoidable reality, as fixing IoT production errors in the field can be incredibly expensive, not to mention that errors can have potentially catastrophic results on the system itself. As a result, determining system resilience is a mission-critical endeavour.

“System resilience is too often based on extrapolation and guesswork, based on out-of-date tools and protocols that are not fit for purpose,” said James Governor, analyst and co-founder at RedMonk, an industry analyst firm. “HiveMQ Swarm is built from the ground up for modern IoT use cases and protocols at scale.”

Swarm was designed to solve the problems of testing large-scale IoT deployments. It is a distributed platform able to create hundreds of millions of unique network connections that simulate devices, messages and MQTT topics – a form of addressing that allows MQTT clients to share information – as well as develop reusable scenarios that emulate device behaviour.

In addition to a custom data generator to create complex use cases for testing, Swarm is designed to integrate seamlessly with enterprise cloud infrastructure, including public clouds such as AWS, Azure, GCP and Kubernetes-based systems.

Swarm is complementary to the HiveMQ MQTT platform, an MQTT broker messaging platform designed for the fast, efficient and reliable movement of data to and from connected IoT devices. It uses the MQTT protocol for instant, bidirectional push of data between devices and enterprise systems.