WS3N: Wireless Secure SDN-Based Communication for Sensor Networks

The Software Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm can provide flexible routing and potentially support the different communication patterns that exist in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). However applying this paradigm to resource-constrained networks is not straightforward, especially if security services are a requirement. Existing SDN-based approaches for WSN evolved over time, addressing resource-constrained requirements. However, they do not integrate security services into their design and implementation. This work’s main contribution is a secure-by-design SDN-based framework for Wireless Sensors Networks. Secure node admission and end-to-end key distribution to support secure communication are considered key services, which the framework must provide. We describe its specification, design, implementation, and experiments considering device and protocol constraints. The results indicate that our approach has achieved such goals with acceptable overheads up to medium sized networks.