6LoWSD: A Protocol Platform for Interoperability Between SDN and IoT

Abstract

With advent of smart cities, the IoT infrastructure is expanding in an exponential manner. This emerging infrastructure is going to produce a huge amount of data to be processed. Besides the data processing bottleneck, energy efficiency, security, interoperability and scalability of the network standard poses another problem to the present Internet of Things (IoT) architecture. So this become an interesting research issue which aims to improve the present IoT architecture by incorporating Software Defined Network (SDN) system in it. SDN, a relatively new paradigm has the capability of resolving the mentioned complexities. If SDN can be incorporated in traditional IoT architecture this will help to resolve many IoT problems. Now the research issue becomes as how to design an effective protocol which can bridge between the traditional IoT and SDN system for effective interoperability. In SDN, control operation are designated in the middle-ware layer, where SDN controllers are placed. Controllers maintains the operation of the whole network. In this paper, an investigation has been made to design a protocol, termed as 6LoWSD protocol, which has the ability to integrate the two systems. Required experimentation have been carried out on simulation to ascertain the effectiveness of the proposed protocol. Here, 6LoWSD was simulated on Contiki platform. 6LoWPAN has been used for the IoT system and OpenFlow for the SDN system. The experimental results displayed quite satisfactory outcomes.