ESD-WSN: An Efficient SDN-Based Wireless Sensor Network Architecture for IoT Applications

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are considered as a key enabler for the paradigm of Internet of Things (IoT). With increasing number of devices connected to the IoT environments, traditional solutions for WSNs tend to be costly in terms of network maintenance and management. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) appears as a viable alternative network architecture since it enables new services and policies to be deployed flexibly and easily. However, SDN brings excessive control overhead which significantly degrades the network performance. To relieve this problem, in this paper, we propose an Efficient Software-Defined Wireless Sensor Network (ESD-WSN) architecture to make full use of the advantages of SDN while overcoming its constraints. In the proposed architecture, the controller dynamically selects certain nodes as proxies for control traffic processing and aggregating. To this end, a Dynamic Proxy Management (DPM) strategy is presented to select the optimal subset of network nodes as proxies. Experimental results show that our scheme achieves considerable performance improvement compared with the SDN-WISE scheme [1].