Link Quality Estimation in Wireless Software Defined Network with a Reliable Control Plane

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has now emerged for many industrial applications. However, many critical applications require high reliability and bounded end-to-end latency. Fortunately, scheduled wireless networks such as IEEE 802.15.4-TSCH try to orchestrate finely the transmissions. In particular, the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm is promising to concentrate the intelligence of the network in a controller and to simplify the functions achieved by the motes. SDN controller relies on link quality information of wireless devices to construct the routing topology of the network and to provision adequate radio resources for each link. We propose here an accurate link quality estimation scheme based on the SDN-TSCH, as an SDN solution for IEEE 802.15.4-TSCH network. We exploit the centralized view of the SDN controller to transmit packets of link quality estimation in a collision-free manner. Moreover, we investigate the performance of the control plane of SDN-TSCH through different shared, dedicated, and hybrid (mix of shared and dedicated cells) approaches. We figured out that the dedicated control plane provides high reliability and fast convergence for wireless SDN networks.