TinySDN: Enabling multiple controllers for software-defined wireless sensor networks

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has been envisioned as a way to reduce the complexity of network configuration and management, enabling innovation in production networks. While SDN started focusing on wired networks, there were proposals specifically for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), but all of them required a single controller to be coupled to the sink. This paper presents TinySDN, a TinyOS-based SDN framework that enables multiple controllers within the WSN. It comprises two main components: the SDN-enabled sensor node, which has an SDN switch and an SDN end device, and the SDN controller node, where the control plane is programmed. TinySDN was designed and implemented to be hardware independent. Experiments were conducted on COOJA simulator, and results concerning delay and memory footprint are presented.