Reduced network forwarding with controller enabled named software defined Internet of Mobile Things

Abstract

Network communication is getting more advanced after massive experimentation and evaluations. Therefore, more devices have been introduced making the traditional network highly complex and difficult to manage. Hence, there is a need to overcome problems being faced by the network for communication during routing or forwarding. Researchers introduced Software Defined Network (SDN) and Named Data Networking (NDN) architectures to cope with the aforementioned issues. SDN decouples the control logic from the data logic. This decoupling provides better manageability and flexibility due to its programmable nature. NDN uses Interest and Data packets that operate only on the required content’s name. It no longer needs the IP addresses. Furthermore, the Internet of Mobile Things (IoMT) is continuously self-configuring and dynamic networks. The nodes in this network are mobile and have arbitrary motions. However, the problem in NDN-IoMT is that each node does packet broadcasting whenever a certain change occurs within the network which creates packet flooding. Therefore, to solve this issue, an optimized forwarding scheme, named Controller Enabled Reduced Forwarding (CERF) is proposed in this paper. CERF is an effective combination of all three domains (i.e. NDN, SDN, IoMT) to get maximum throughput and effectiveness within the network. The proposed CERF scheme mitigates the broadcasting over the network by using forwarding flows generated by the controller node. These flows let only selective nodes forward packets. Different performance metrics are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme against native NDN and SDN-based routing schemes. These evaluations show satisfactory results of the proposed CERF scheme as compared to the others.