Energy Efficient and Reliable Maintenance for SDN-Based Scheduled Wireless Networks

Wireless industrial networks represent a key enabler for Industry 4.0. Since wireless links are known to be lossy, most deployments rely on scheduled transmissions to avoid collisions. Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a famous architecture where a controller centralizes all the configuration. In a scheduled wireless network, the SDN paradigm has to be extended to allocate both paths and bandwidth. Unfortunately, most solutions address only the initial configuration, which becomes suboptimal when the link quality evolves, or the conditions change. We propose here the mechanisms for continuous optimization. We define how control packets can reconfigure the data plane while guaranteeing a globally consistent state, even when the control plane exploits unreliable links. No data packet is dropped because of inconsistent forwarding rules. To be energy efficient, we also propose a scheduling algorithm that minimizes the network reconfiguration to minimize the overhead. Our simulation results highlight the strength of our proposition to handle topology and link quality changes.