Towards a distributed control system for software defined wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a developing networking paradigm that advocates a complete overhaul of the conventional networking. SDN decouples the control logic from the data forwarding functionality; which traditionally are coupled on the network device. The coupling stifles innovation and evolution because the network often becomes rigid. Software Defined Wireless Sensor Networks (SDWSN) is also an emerging network paradigm that infuses the SDN model into Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). WSNs have inherent constraints such as energy, memory etc. which have been a major hindrance of their progress. The application of SDN model in WSN is set to cultivate the potential of WSNs in modern communication and to bring about the efficiency that the WSNs have not yet achieved due to their inherent constraints. SDN based networks are anchored on the central controller for functionality. As the network scale up, issues of scalability, reliability and congestion arises and for that a distributed controllers are proposed. This paper investigates the viability of a distributed control system for SDWSN. The test results conducted show that it is viable to deploy a distributed control system for SDWSN; however an improvement is needed on the efficiency.