A critical survey on overhead control traffic reduction strategies in software-defined wireless sensor networking

Abstract

The rising interest in the Internet of Things has contributed to the rapid deployment of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, as a result of the design of the sensor nodes and networks, WSNs exhibit dynamic challenges in mobile and large-scale applications. The nodes are equipped with limited resources and the networks have static architectures. These problems hinder the effective implementation of WSNs. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is intended to overcome these problems by removing control logic from the data plane and incorporating programmability to allow dynamic management and control of the nodes. Unfortunately, the gains from incorporating SDN into WSNs are diminished by high overhead control traffic, created to discover and maintain a global network topology view, leading to impaired network performance. This paper provides a systematic overview of the software-defined wireless network sensor literature to identify potential gaps and to provide recommendations for future studies.