A new software-defined network architecture to solve energy balance problems in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are an important part of the internet of things. In WSNs, the sensor battery is limited, and the entire network has a data aggregation node called Sink. When the sensor transmits data to the Sink in a multi-hop manner, the sensors around the Sink also help other sensors to forward the data to the Sink. This causes those sensors to die faster than other sensors. This problem is called energy hole problem. Previous solutions such as sensor uneven distribution schemes and clustering schemes are not only difficult to implement, but also increase the design cost of the system. In particular, traditional WSNs cannot be updated once deployed. In order to solve the above problem, we propose a method of combining SDN and WSNs. The simulation results show that the proposed method has good performance in terms of the number of surviving sensors, network capacity and residual energy.