μSDN: An SDN-Based Routing Architecture for Wireless Sensor Networks

Recently, the SDN paradigm, which splits the control and data planes, initially defined for wired networks, has been considered as a solution for the management of WSNs (Wireless Sensor Networks). However, the adoption of OpenFlow protocol, the most widely deployed SDN standard, directly into the WSNs may require novel / customized hardware or incur significant signaling overhead. This paper proposes a novel routing architecture for WSN, based on SDN principles, by extending existing protocols, which allows its deployment in legacy motes. A testbed based evaluation demonstrates the comparable performance results regarding signaling overheads and energy consumption to AODV and LQRP, routing protocols widely used in WSN and extended in this papers as a means of demonstrating the feasibility of a smooth transition to the future all-SDN WSNs. Although a case study has been conducted on a proprietary platform, the paper shows a viable path for similar extensions on other solutions to benefit from flexible management and programmability provided by the SDN paradigm.