Software-defined wireless mesh networking for reliable and real-time smart city cyber physical applications

Abstract

The growing demand for and the diverse mobility patterns of smart devices place an increasing strain on the wireless mesh networks (WMNs) of smart city cyber physical systems (CPS). Realizing reliable and real-time smart city CPS applications is challenging because routing the data among wireless routers using existing routing algorithms that are based on Ad-Hoc and local area network flavors cannot make effective routing decisions due mainly to only local knowledge maintained by an individual router about each of its neighbors, which reflects only a partial visibility of the network. An attractive and more realistic alternative is to adopt Software Defined Networking (SDN), which offers a logically centralized, up-to-date view of the entire network by refactoring the wireless protocols into control and forwarding decisions. This paper presents solutions to overcome key challenges that must first be overcome to realize the potential of SDN in WMNs for smart city applications. Specifically, we describe a novel network architecture that integrates SDN and WMNs to perform network virtualization, routing and network traffic engineering thereby improving the predictability, reliability and the flexibility of the communication network. The benefits of this approach are demonstrated and evaluated for an emulated smart cities use case.