A Multi-Protocol Software-Defined Networking Solution for the Internet of Things

Abstract

IoT has evolved from an experimental to a backbone technology able to connect myriads of people, things, and services for a large range of businesses. At the same time, the emergence of SDN can ideally handle IoT challenges for elasticity, heterogeneity, and mobility, offering an architecture that abstracts decision making away from the data plane and providing a programmable network facility. Along these lines, we propose MINOS, a multi-protocol SDN platform for IoT that implements service awareness utilizing appropriate SDN abstractions and interfaces for logically centralized network control of diverse and resource-constrained IoT environments, two network protocols that are deployable and configurable on demand, and a GUI that provides a bespoke dashboard and a real-time visualization tool. Due to its components, MINOS enables experimentation with novel network control features and protocols that realize optimized routing over heterogeneous IoT nodes, application of real-time strategies as a response to dynamic network conditions, support of individual protocol configurations per node, and flexibility to accommodate new protocols and control algorithms. Our results demonstrate MINOS as an enabling platform for two protocols, CORAL-SDN and Adaptable-RPL, which, in comparison with the state-of-the-art IoT routing protocol RPL, improve the packet delivery ratio with relatively small control overhead.