SoftIoT: A resource-aware SDN/NFV-based IoT network

Abstract

The proliferation of the Internet of things (IoT) devices and the corresponding high-volume sensing data pave the path for data-driven IoT services such as smart cities and smart farming. The first step towards achieving such services is to efficiently collect the data at collection centers, which requires an agile data collection strategy coping with dynamic environment changes. Network programmability (software-defined networking (SDN) or network function virtualization (NFV)) fits this need by enabling re-configurable IoT networks. However, existing SDN/NFV-based solutions in the IoT context fall back due to the lack of resource and overhead awareness and the compatibility with standard protocols. SoftIoT fills that gap by designing SDN/NFV-enabled IoT nodes and network architecture that consider resource and energy constraints a top priority. It optimizes the number of activated NFV nodes and assigns traffic sources to that VNFs over optimal routes of enough energy and link quality. We extensively evaluate the performance of SoftIoT in the Cooja simulator over the Contiki OS using real sensor traffic, which shows that the proposed solution consumes 40% and 60% less energy than existing works. SoftIoT also outperforms its counterparts over the packet delivery ratio, network lifetime, and overhead reduction while being compatible with standard protocols.