Empowering the Internet of Things with Software Defined Networking [ WHITE PAPER ]

The flexibility and general programmability offered by the Software Defined Networking (SDN) technology has supposed a disruption in the evolution of the network. It offers enormous benefits to network control and opens new ways of communication by defining powerful but simple switching elements (forwarders) that can use any single field of a packet or message to determine the outgoing port to which it will be forwarded. Such benefits can be applied to the Internet of Things (IoT) and thus resolve some of the main challenges it exposes, such as the ability to let devices connected to heterogeneous networks to communicate each other. In the present document we describe a general model to integrate SDN and IoT so that heterogeneous communications are achieved. However, it exposes other (simpler) challenges must be resolved, evaluated, and validated against current and future solutions before the design of the integrated approach can be finished.