DTARP

Abstract

The challenge of efficient point-to-point communication in meshed Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks (WSANs) can be addressed by Software Defined Networking (SDN). In contrast to the traditional routing protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) that use distributed local information for routing decisions, SDN based routing protocols can access global topology information for routing decisions. The global topology information enables more efficient routing decisions. Accordingly, this paper proposes the SDN based innovative Dynamic Traffic Aware Routing Protocol (DTARP) that uses up-to-date traffic information from the WSAN and topology metrics from graph theory to increase the overall energy efficiency of the WSAN and to avoid traffic congestion in the network. The proposed routing algorithm has been prototyped and compared to other routing algorithms. The evaluation shows a clear advantage of SDN-based routing for peer-to-peer IoT communication.