Fuzzy topology discovery protocol for SDN-based wireless sensor networks

Abstract

The growing trend in pervasive systems forces traditional wireless sensor networks to deal with new challenges, such as dynamic application requirements and heterogeneous networks. One of the latest paradigms in this area is software defined wireless sensor network. According to the paradigm, the networks take care of managing topological information and forwarding decisions using a bipartite architecture in which a control plane decides the forwarding policies and the data plane (i.e. ordinary sensor nodes) executes them. Unfortunately, in highly dynamic networks, this approach generates an overhead of control packet exchange between the ordinary nodes and the control plane, that leads to additional energy consumptions. This paper proposes a fuzzy logic based solution, called Fuzzy Topology Discovery Protocol (FTDP), to improve the efficiency of software defined wireless sensor networks. This work is designed according to the Software Defined Networking solution for WIreless SEnsor networks (SDN-WISE), which is an open source solution for software defined wireless sensor networks. The proposed work is one of the first attempts to use fuzzy theory in software defined based wireless sensor networks. The simulation results show that our approach can increase the lifetime of the network by 45% and decreases the packet loss ratio by 50% compared to the basic SDN-WISE solution.