A SDN-based testbed for underwater sensor networks

Encouraged by the success in both terrestrial wired and wireless networks, software-defined networking (SDN) is envisioned as a promising technique to tackle inherent problems in underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs), and propel the development of UWSNs further. As the offshore application deployments of UWSNs are both expensive and labor-intensive, it is urgent to develop efficient experimental testbeds or platforms in order to test or evaluate SDN-based algorithms. In this paper, we propose a novel experimental testbed for SDN-based UWSNs, in which the implementation of the control plane is with one-hop out-of-band RF channel, e.g., LoRa or LoRaWAN, whereas the traditional underwater acoustic channel serves as the data plane. Armed with the global view of the whole testbed, the two-channel SDN-based architecture not only improves the testbed efficiency, but also increases the testbed flexibility and adaptability. We provide a use case to illustrate how to use the testbed by comparing three different routing control models, such as SDN-based centralized control, SDN-based semi-centralized control and distributed control, and hope to inspire more research with this novel testbed.