In-Network Data Processing in Software-Defined IoT with a Programmable Data Plane

Abstract

Making an SDN data plane flexible enough to satisfy the various requirements of heterogeneous IoT applications is very desirable in terms of software-defined IoT (SD-IoT) networking. Network devices with a programmable data plane provide an ability to dynamically add new packet- and data-processing procedures to IoT applications. The previously proposed solutions for the addition of the programmability feature to the SDN data plane provide extensibility for the packet-forwarding operations of new protocols, but IoT applications need a more flexible programmability for in-network data-processing operations (e.g., the sensing-data aggregation from thousands of sensor nodes). Moreover, some IoT models such as OMG DDS, oneM2M, and Eclipse SCADA use the publish-subscribe model that is difficult to represent using the operations of the existing message-centric data-plane models. We introduce a new in-network data-processing scheme for the SD-IoT data plane that defines an event-driven data-processing model that can express a variety of in-network data-processing cases in the SD-IoT environment. Also, the proposed model comprises a language for the programming of the data-processing procedures, while a flexible data-plane structure that can install and execute the programs at runtime is additionally presented. We demonstrate the flexibility of the proposed scheme by using sample programs in a number of example SD-IoT cases.