SD-MIoT: A Software-Defined Networking Solution for Mobile Internet of Things

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) brings new potentials in humans' everyday life activities through enabling applications with stringent communication demands, including mobile IoT applications. State-of-the-art routing protocols for the IoT, such as IPv6 routing protocol for low-power and lossy networks (RPL), have not been originally designed for such challenging applications. Recent proposals blend the software-defined networking (SDN) paradigm with IoT, enabling better-informed and bespoke routing control, matching the application requirements. In this article, we propose SD-MIoT, an open-source SDN solution for mobile IoT environments that consists of a modular SDN controller and an OpenFlow-like protocol. SD-MIoT detects passively in real-time, the network's mobile nodes through mobility detector (MODE), an intelligent algorithm that utilizes the connectivity graph of the SDN controller. It incorporates novel mobility-aware topology discovery mechanisms, routing policies, and flow-rule establishment methods, all of them balancing control overhead with routing robustness, according to nodes' mobility behavior detected by MODE. We provide extensive evaluation results over two realistic scenarios, further confirming the suitability of SD-MIoT for mobile IoT environments and demonstrating reliable operation in terms of successful data packet delivery with low control overhead.