Rethinking the Design of LR-WPAN IoT Systems with Software-Defined Networking

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are becoming a key enabling technology for Internet of Things (IoT) by virtue of providing a highly unstructured cloud of wireless devices. Despite these advances, the current Internet architecture is not able to cater to the high volume of new traffic patterns delivered by these smart sensing devices. In this context, Software Defined Networking (SDN) has emerged as an intelligent solution to deliver dramatic improvements in network programmability, agility and flexibility. However, SDN was originally targeted to wired networks deployed in cloud data centers, and does not lend itself well to WSNs due primarily to its higher footprint and lack of WSN programmable interfaces. To address these challenges, this paper describes an approach to realize software-defined wireless sensor networks by introducing a novel SDN-enabled architecture for WSNs that can be used for diverse IoT systems. Specifically, we propose new control plane services for supporting automatic topology discovery, sensor virtualization as well as managing network policies. Additionally, we introduce new customized SDN-enabled flow tables to meet the requirements of sensor network packets. Finally, we introduce a programmable MAC layer to support fine-grained flow processing.