Leveraging SDN to conserve energy in WSN-An analysis

Energy conservation is one of the serious problems faced by WSN as the sensor nodes have limited battery power and are expected to perform data aggregation and actuation functions in addition to sensing data. Literature has plenty of solutions proposed to reduce energy consumption and usage. With the recent upcoming technology of introducing network programmability that centralizes network management tasks using software defined architecture (SDN), network trafficking is a prominent domain for applicability of SDN. Inherent traffic issues in WSN like data forwarding, aggregation of the data, path break and energy consumption can be efficiently handled by SDN, which provides a platform in which the data plane and the control plane are separated. By integrating SDN in WSN, the sensor nodes perform only forwarding and don't take any routing decision, due to which energy usage will be reduced. We propose a general framework for a software-defined wireless sensor network where the controller will be implemented at the base station, centre nodes in the cluster acts as switches and communication between the switch and the controller is via OpenFlow protocol. We realize the energy saving in the proposed architecture with the results obtained using NS2 and mininet emulator environments.