An SDN approach to route massive data flows of sensor networks

Abstract

SummaryWith the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), more and more devices can establish a connection with local area networks and use routing protocols to forward all information to the sink. But these devices may not have enough resources to execute a complex routing protocol or to memorize all information about the network. With proactive routing protocols, each node calculates the best path, and it needs enough resources to memorize the network topology. With reactive routing protocols, each node has to broadcast the message to learn the right path that the packets must follow. In all cases, in large networks such as IoT, this is not an appropriate mechanism. This paper presents a new software‐defined network (SDN)–based network architecture to optimize the resource consumption of each IoT object while securing the exchange of messages between the embedded devices. In this architecture, the controller is in charge of all decisions, and objects only exchange messages and forward packets among themselves. In the case of large networks, the network is organized into clusters. Our proposed network architectures are tested with 1000 things grouped in five clusters and managed by one SDN controller. The tests using OpenDayLight and IoT embedded applications have been implemented on several scenarios providing the ability and the scalability from dynamic reorganization of the end‐devices. This approach explores the network performance issues using a virtualized SDN‐clustered environment which contributes to a new model for future network architectures.