μSDN: An SDN-Based Routing Architecture for Wireless Sensor Networks

• Leonardo Francisco da Silva Santos UFPE
• Francisco Ferreira de Mendonça Júnior UFPE
• Kelvin Lopes Dias UFPE

Resumo

Recently, the SDN paradigm, which splits the control and data planes, initially defined for wired networks, has been considered as a solution for the management of WSNs (Wireless Sensor Networks). However, the adoption of OpenFlow protocol, the most widely deployed SDN standard, directly into the WSNs may require novel / customized hardware or incur significant signaling overhead. This paper proposes a novel routing architecture for WSN, based on SDN principles, by extending existing protocols, which allows its deployment in legacy motes. A testbed based evaluation demonstrates the comparable performance results regarding signaling overheads and energy consumption to AODV and LQRP, routing protocols widely used in WSN and extended in this papers as a means of demonstrating the feasibility of a smooth transition to the future all-SDN WSNs. Although a case study has been conducted on a proprietary platform, the paper shows a viable path for similar extensions on other solutions to benefit from flexible management and programmability provided by the SDN paradigm.

Palavras-chave: Wireless sensor networks, Routing, Routing protocols, Hardware, Computer architecture, Proposals, Wireless Sensor Networks, Software-Defined Networks, Programmable Networks, Internet of Things