An IoT-based packet aggregation mechanism for the SDN-based wide area networks

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is destined to play a crucial role in our daily lives. Numerous short packets are sent over the networks due to these IoT devices' communication with one another or with the relevant servers via the Internet, which causes an increase in the bps and pps in the network nodes, high overheads, and inefficient performance of the networks. Many packet aggregation mechanisms have been developed and studied to solve these issues. Among them, some works are about the aggregation of the IoT packets in the WAN area; however, they have few studies and discussions about selecting the aggregator nodes and the possible options. In this work, a packet aggregation mechanism is proposed for near-the-edge SDN-based AS networks in the WAN area, which can select the aggregation type and the aggregator nodes among the possible options. The simulation results of the proposed mechanism are presented for different options, and the related discussions and comparisons are made. The results show improvements in the network efficiency for different modes of the proposed packet aggregation mechanism related to the non-aggregation mode and simple/app-level aggregation in all network nodes.