Work-in-Progress: Towards Real-Time Smart City Communications using Software Defined Wireless Mesh Networking

Effective management and provisioning of communication resources is as important in meeting the real-time requirements of smart city cyber physical systems (CPS) as managing computation resources is. The communication infrastructure in Smart cities often involves wireless mesh networks (WMNs). However, enforcing distributed and consistent control in WMNs is challenging since individual routers of a WMN maintain only local knowledge about each of its neighbors, which reflects only a partial visibility of the overall network and hence results in suboptimal resource management decisions. When WMNs must utilize emerging technologies, such as time-sensitive networking (TSN) for the most critical communication needs, e.g., controlling traffic and pedestrian lights, these challenges are further complicated. An attractive solution is to adopt Software Defined Networking (SDN), which offers a centralized, up-to-date view of the entire network by refactoring the wireless protocols into control and forwarding decisions. This paper presents ongoing work to overcome the key challenges and support the end-to-end real-time requirements of smart city CPS applications.