Software defined networking based resource management and quality of service support in wireless sensor network applications

Abstract

To achieve greater performance in computing networks, a setup of critical computing aspects that ensures efficient network operation, needs to be implemented. One of these computing aspects is, Quality of Service (QoS). Its main functionality is to manage traffic queues by means of prioritizing sensitive network traffic. QoS capable networking allows efficient control of traffic especially for network critical data. However, to achieve this in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) is a serious challenge, since these technologies have a lot of computing limitations. It is even difficult to manage networking resources with ease in these types of technologies, due to their communication, processing and memory limitations. Even though this is the case with WSNs, they have been largely used in monitoring/detection systems, and by this proving their application importance. Realizing efficient network control requires intelligent methods of network management, especially for sensitive network data. Different network types implement diverse methods to control and administer network traffic as well as effectively manage network resources. As with WSNs, communication traffic and network resource control are mostly performed depending on independently employed mechanisms to deal with networking events occurring on different levels. It is therefore challenging to realize efficient network performance with guaranteed QoS in WSNs, given their computing limitations. Software defined networking (SDN) is advocated as a potential paradigm to improve and evolve WSNs in terms of capacity and application. A means to apply SDN strategies to these compute-limited WSNs, formulates software defined wireless sensor networks (SDWSN). In this work, a resource-aware OpenFlow-based Active Network Management (OF-ANM) QoS scheme that uses SDN strategies is proposed and implemented to apply QoS requirements for managing traffic congestion in WSNs. This scheme uses SDN programmability strategies to apply network QoS requirements and perform traffic load balancing to ensure congestion control in SDWSN. Our experimental results show that the developed scheme is able to provide congestion avoidance within the network. It also allows opportunities to implement flexible QoS requirements based on the system’s traffic state. Moreover, a QoS Path Selection and Resource-associating (Q-PSR) scheme for adaptive load balancing and intelligent resource control for optimal network performance is proposed and implemented. Our experimental results indicate better performance in terms of computation with load balancing and efficient resource alignment for different networking tasks when compared with other competing schemes.