SMDP-Based Radio Resource Allocation Scheme in Software-Defined Internet of Things Networks

With rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT), various machine-to-machine communications technologies have emerged in recent years to provide ubiquitous wireless connections for a massive number of IoT devices. This poses significant challenges to network control and management of large-scale IoT networks. Software-defined networking (SDN) is considered a promising technology to streamline network management due to dynamic reconfigurable network elements. Thus, the integration of SDN and IoT provides a potentially feasible solution to strengthening management and control capabilities of the IoT network. Benefit from the SDN technology, resource utilization in the IoT network can be further enhanced. In this paper, we first propose a software-defined network architecture for IoT. Then, the resource allocation problem in the proposed SDN-based IoT network is investigated. The optimal problem of maximizing the expected average rewards of the network is formulated as a semi-Markov decision process (SMDP). The optimal solution is obtained through solving the SMDP problem using a relative value iteration algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed resource allocation scheme is able to improve the system rewards compared with other comparative resource allocation schemes.