Time-Constrained Big Data Transfer for SDN-Enabled Smart City

With advanced ICT, the ever-rapid development of informatization has become an integral part of smart city services in healthcare, transportation, energy, education, business, community life, and so on. A huge amount of data, called big data, is generated from various sources, and effective analysis and utilization of big data has become a key factor in the success of smart city services. However, in order to achieve precise big data analytics and make real-time decisions, one of the challenging issues is how to efficiently deliver the huge amounts of collected data to the processing servers. In this article, we first propose a novel architecture to support smart city services based on SDN technology. Then we study the time-constrained big data transfer scheduling (TBTS) problem under the proposed architecture, and present an intelligent strategy to address the TBTS issue by utilizing the SDN controller to conduct dynamic flow control and multi-path transfer scheduling. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed strategy can efficiently support big data transfer in terms of low transfer delay and high bandwidth utilization.