Soft-WSN: Software-Defined WSN Management System for IoT Applications

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a software-defined wireless sensor network architecture ( Soft-WSN )—an effort to support application-aware service provisioning in Internet of Things (IoT). Detailed architecture of the proposed system is presented involving the application, control, and infrastructure layers to enable software-defined networking (SDN) in IoT. We design a software-defined controller, which includes two management policies—device management and network management. Device management facilitates users to control their devices in the network. To enable device control mechanisms, we investigate three scheduling issues in a sensor node—sensing task, sensing delay, and active sleep. On the other hand, the topology of the network is controlled by the network management policies, which can be modified in run time to deal with dynamic requirements of IoT. Furthermore, the proposed scheme is implemented in a real hardware platform without changing the underlying sensor networking concepts, so that existing sensor devices can be seamlessly integrated. Therefore, in contrast to the existing SDN solutions for WSNs, the proposed system, Soft-WSN , focuses on both device management and topology management to meet run-time application-specific requirements of IoT, while enhancing flexibility and simplicity of WSN management. Experimental results on a real hardware-based test bed indicate that the proposed scheme is beneficial to meet real-time application-specific requirements of IoT, while ensuring significant improvements on network performance over the traditional approaches.