SDN based QoS aware bandwidth management framework of ISP for smart homes

With the increasing number of IoT (Internet of Things) devices and advance of smart home technologies, we propose a SDN (Software Defined Networking) based QoS (Quality of Service) aware bandwidth management framework of ISP (Internet Service Provider) for IoT enabled smart homes. The application scope of this research assumes that an ISP should support thousands of smart homes. Each smart home is equipped with tens of IoT devices with a wide spectrum of functional capabilities and each smart home exploits a variety of services. The overall system architecture is divided into SDN Smart Home Cloud at ISP side and massive SDN enabled Smart Homes. The Smart Home Cloud is interconnected with Smart Homes through OpenFlow protocol. With this architecture, we first prioritized smart home services into categories by adapting 3GPP LTE QoS Class Identifier (QCI). Then we propose a Smart Home Bandwidth Allocation (SHBA) strategy to calculate appropriate bandwidth for each service category according to distinct QoS requirements. ISP can thus use SHBA to optimize bandwidth allocation of aggregated and classified services of smart homes. The experiments are performed under a SDN based network environment constructed by Linux based OpenvSwitch, Ryu controller and Mininet. The experiment results show that the proposed framework can effectively enhance QoS and outperform the traditional ISP bandwidth allocation strategy in terms of average transfer rate, delay and jitter.