Managing IoT-Based Smart Healthcare Systems Traffic with Software Defined Networks

Internet of things (IoT) aims to connect billions of devices to the Internet. These devices generate an enormous amount of traffic. A Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) aggregates the data generated from the body sensors deployed on the human body or inside it. Due to resource constraints of the deployed sensors, aggregated data is forwarded to a server at an edge node or a cloud for further processing and decision making. With the wide acceptance of IoT deployments, WBANs can also be integrated with IoT to provide a clear contextual environment for smart healthcare applications' users. Software Defined Networks (SDN) is a new networking paradigm providing centralized control and programmability of the networks. These features of SDN open new vistas for WBAN and IoT applications. In this paper, a personal digital assistant (PDA) is configured as an SDN switch, and we emulate the SDN functionality with Mininet to verify that this approach can be used in WBANs with minimum deployment complexity and network overhead, while efficiently manage the connected devices and the connections between them.