Optimized Link Utilization Based Approach for Traffic Engineering in SDWSN

Abstract

In Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), resource optimization is one of the challenging issues. It improves the network performance. This can be achieved with the help of a new networking technology, called Software Defined Networking (SDN). The concept of SDN is to decouple the control plane from the forwarding plane of a network to improve the performance of the networking applications. Traffic Engineering (TE) is a domain of network applications that manages the network traffic, and try to optimize the network resources. SDN offers multiple features to support TE applications. SDN combined with WSN forms a new networking domain called Software Defined WSN (SDWSN). Since WSN has resource-constrained nodes, resource optimization is a need in WSN. This paper proposes an optimized link utilization based approach for TE in SDWSN. The proposed approach discusses about a traffic optimization algorithm, called Optimized Link Allocation based TE (OLA-TE). OLA-TE is implemented at the controller node and helps to improve the overall network utilization. The SDN sensor nodes find the optimized path for traffic routing with the help of controller node. The proposed approach is compared with the traditional WSN approach. IBM CPLEX Optimization Studio and MATLAB are used for validation purposes. The CPLEX results assure a network flow-cost optimization of about 10%. The results of MATLAB show that despite having extra control traffic on network, the network performance gets improved over the period of time.