Software Defined Network Based Management Framework for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) has growth rapidly over the past years. As it is now applied in many fields as in health care systems, home automation, security surveillance, disaster management and more. Due to the high demand on WSN, it is important to find a solution for one of the major challenges in WSN which is the energy consumption of its battery operated sensor device. So in this paper we propose to use Software Defined technology into WSN to enhance network management and to prolong network lifetime. As the main feature of Software Defined Network (SDN) is the centralization of control by separating between control plane and data plane. This transform sensor nodes from forwarding devices into dummy devices (or receiver only) also simplifies network management. We study different SDN-based management architectures. We adapt the logically centralized-physically distributed architecture in a WSN environment. Our simulation of the studied SDN-based WSN management using Mininet-WIFI simulator shows that the logically centralized-physically distributed architecture outperforms the other architectures in achieving less delay and higher throughput. © 2018 IEEE.