Abstract
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are becoming increasingly popular with the advent of the Internet of things (IoT). Various real-world applications of WSNs such as in smart grids, smart farming and smart health would require a potential deployment of thousands or maybe hundreds of thousands of sensor nodes/actuators. To ensure proper working order and network efficiency of such a network of sensor nodes, an effective WSN management system has to be integrated. However, the inherent challenges of WSNs such as sensor/actuator heterogeneity, application dependency and resource constraints have led to challenges in implementing effective traditional WSN management. This difficulty in management increases as the WSN becomes larger. Software Defined Networking (SDN) provides a promising solution in flexible management WSNs by allowing the separation of the control logic from the sensor nodes/actuators. The advantage with this SDN-based management in WSNs is that it enables centralized control of the entire WSN making it simpler to deploy network-wide management protocols and applications on demand. This paper highlights some of the recent work on traditional WSN management in brief and reviews SDN-based management techniques for WSNs in greater detail while drawing attention to the advantages that SDN brings to traditional WSN management. This paper also investigates open research challenges in coming up with mechanisms for flexible and easier SDN-based WSN configuration and management.
Highlights
Darwish et al [67] identify challenges to implementing Wireless body Area Networks (WBANs) among which are sensor maintenance once body-worn, energy management for sensor batteries considering that charging would be pose a challenge especially for the elderly as they have to remember to charge multiple sensors, insufficient bandwidth resource to allow for transmission of large amounts of medical diagnostic data, meeting the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of health monitoring hindered by Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) resource constraints, reliability of critical medical data packets being delivered, security and privacy of medical data, scalability and sensor mobility challenges as patients move about in their daily life
This paper reviewed the various contributions to managing WSNs and techniques available for Software Defined Networking (SDN)-based management of WSNs
A highlight of the main real-world WSN applications and how SDN would improve the management of the applications was presented
Summary
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of individual nodes that interact with the environment by sensing and controlling physical parameters such as temperature, pressure and volume [1,2]. The above problems are inherent to WSNs because each node is made to have all the functionalities from the physical layer to the application layer behaving like an autonomous system that performs both the data forwarding and network control [21] Much as this works well especially with small-scale short range WSNs due to well-developed algorithms,it lacks simplicity and flexibility making it hard to manage when trying to implement a long range and low power WSN at a large-scale.
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