Demo abstract: An experimentation facility enabling flexible network control for the Internet of Things

Abstract

We present a showcase of our SDN-inspired facility for the Internet of Things (IoT) - the CORAL (Cross-Layer Control of Data Flows) infrastructure. CORAL provides a hierarchy of network controllers that monitor network behaviour and adapts network protocol parameters on demand. It is built on top of rich network control abstractions and is hardware-independent. Our facility offloads protocol functionality to the controllers, enabling intelligent IoT protocol adaptations. To demonstrate our solution, we focused on the IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL). Although RPL is the state-of-the-art routing protocol for constrained devices and lossy networks, it is inefficient in mobile environments. We show a particular example where, using CORAL, we improve the Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) in a dynamic IoT topology.