Programmable node in software-defined wireless sensor networks: A review

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and the Internet of Things play a critical role in many applications ranging from monitoring, tracking and surveillance, social enhancement and many more. Although WSN is used for applications above, still there are some challenges it faces. A few of the challenges faced by WSN include the inability to withstand a large number of sensor nodes deployed in a heterogeneous system leaving the WSN system unmanaged. So recently, there is a huge interest to utilize Software-Defined Networking (SDN) in WSN with more focus on the architecture, routing protocols, topology discovery, SDN controllers, etc. However, without an SDN-enabled sensor node, these systems/models will not be able to operate efficiently and reduce the complication of network configurations and management. Thus, this paper caters the design and development of SDN- enabled sensor node that is applicable to different applications and allowing functions of different processes within the WSN to run efficiently and reduce the costs, improving energy efficiency, scalability and render a system with multiple of functional sensors.