Software-defined network based bidirectional data exchange scheme for heterogeneous internet of things environment

Abstract

The popularity of Internet of Things (IoT) triggers the rapid development of various IoT platforms, standards, and protocols. However, the differences and heterogeneity among IoT platforms, standards and protocols have become the critical difficulty to interconnect a mass of IoT devices. According to our observation, most IoT standards and platforms utilize similar light-weighted network protocols, i.e., CoAP and MQTT. Thus, in this paper, one bidirectional data exchange scheme based on software-defined network (SDN) is proposed to let two IoT devices with different IoT protocols, i.e., CoAP and MQTT, be able to communicate each other more straightforward. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme costs more time to establish one traffic flow. Once the traffic flow is established, the transmission performance is a little lower than the existing mechanism, i.e., Ponte.