Alleviating Heterogeneity in SDN-IoT Networks to Maintain QoS and Enhance Security

Software-defined networks (SDNs) offer unique and attractive solutions to solve challenging management issues in Internet of Things (IoT)-based large-scale multitechnological networks. SDN-IoT network collaboration is innovative and attractive but expected to be extremely heterogeneous in future generation IoT systems. For example, multitechnology network, network externality, and nodes heterogeneity in SDN-IoT may seriously affect the flow or application-specific quality-of-service (QoS) requirements. Furthermore, it highly influences security adoption in a network of interconnected IoT nodes. We observe that both QoS and security are interdependent and nonnegligible factors, thus we emphasize that in order to alleviate heterogeneity it is inevitable to study both these factors hand to hand (or vice versa). With this aim, first, we discuss significant and reasonable cases to encourage researchers to study QoS and security integrally in order to alleviate heterogeneity at SDN-IoT control plane. Second, we propose a framework which successfully transforms the $m$ heterogeneous controllers to $n$ homogeneous controller groups. The key metric of our observation and analysis is the SDN controller’s response time. Following this, to validate our approach, we use the mathematical model and a proof of concept (PoC) in a virtual SDN ecosystem is demonstrated. From performance evaluation, we observe that the proposed framework significantly alleviates heterogeneity which helps to maintain QoS and enhance security. This fundamental analysis will enable network security individuals to deal heterogeneity, QoS, and security, of SDN-IoT, in more successful and promising ways.