Mobility analysis and response for software-defined internet of things

Abstract

The exponential growth of devices connected to the network has resulted in the development of new IoT applications and services. A large number of IoT devices are application-specific which makes the network difficult to manage and change. The Software Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm brings a new perspective of solving the network rigidity issue. By decoupling the control plane from the data plane, the routing decisions can be conducted in a centralized way, thus simplifying the network configuration and management. However, the behavior of IoT nodes is diverse and some nodes demonstrate the features of high mobility. The high mobility makes the centralized routing protocols perform badly since the Controller cannot maintain the frequently changing topology information in real-time, which produces unnecessary control overheads, even incorrect network policies. To address the problem, in this paper, we first propose a behavior analysis and modeling method to identify the high mobility nodes in the IoT network. After that, a Mobility-aware Flow Table Reservation (MFTR) mechanism is proposed for the high mobility nodes to realize the local search and collaboration. Finally, we implement a prototype with the proposed techniques on Contiki 2.6 in a real testbed. The experimental results show our scheme outperforms the original SDN-based scheme in terms of packet delivery ratio and energy consumption.