A Distributed SDN Controller for Distributed IoT

Abstract

Over the past decade, the Internet of Things (IoT) has undergone a paradigm shift away from centralized cloud computing towards edge computing. Hundreds of billions of things are estimated to be deployed in the rapidly advancing IoT paradigm, resulting in enormous amounts of data. Transmitting all these data to the cloud has recently proven to be a performance bottleneck, as it causes many network issues relating to latency, power consumption, security, privacy, etc. However, existing paradigms do not use edge devices for decision making. The use of distributed intelligence could strengthen the IoT in several ways by distributing decision-making tasks to edge devices within the network, rather than sending all data to a central server. In this approach, all computational tasks and data are shared among edge devices. To achieve efficient distribution of IoT intelligence and utilization of network resources, it is necessary to integrate the transport network control with distributed edge and cloud resources to provide dynamic and efficient IoT services. This challenge can be overcome by equipping an edge IoT gateway with the intelligence required to extract information from raw data and to decide whether to actuate itself or to outsource complex tasks to the cloud. Distributed intelligence refers to a collaboration between the cloud and the edge. In this context, we first introduce a distributed SDN-based architecture for IoT that enables IoT gateways to perform IoT processing dynamically at the edge of the network, based on the current state of network resources. Next, we propose an algorithm for selecting clients for the training process of Federated Learning Applications, based on the context information of the network. In the last step, we deploy Federated Learning Applications in our distributed SDN-based architecture, using the gateways to provide distributed intelligence at the edge of the network, and conduct a comprehensive and detailed evaluation of the system from several perspectives.