Can SDN Technology Be Transported to Software-Defined WSN/IoT?

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are essential elements of the Internet of Things ecosystem, as such, they encounter numerous IoT challenging architectural, management and application issues. These include inflexible control, manual configuration and management of sensor nodes, difficulty in an orchestration of resources, and virtualizing sensor network resources for on-demand applications and services. Addressing these issues presents a real challenge for WSNs and IoTs. By separating the network control plane from the data forwarding plane, Software-defined networking (SDN) has emerged as network technology that addresses similar problems of current switched-networks. Despite the differences between switched network and wireless sensor network domains, the SDN technology has a real potential to revolutionize WSNs/IoTs and address their challenging issues. However, very little has been attempted to bring the SDN paradigm to WSNs. This paper identifies weaknesses of existing research efforts that aims to bring the benefits of SDN to WSNs by mapping the control plane, the OpenFlow protocol, and the functionality between the two network domains. In particular, the paper investigates the difficulties and challenges in the development of software-defined wireless sensor networking (SDWSN). Finally, the paper proposes VSensor, SDIoT controller, SFlow components with specific and relevant functionality for an architecture of an SDWSN or SDIoT infrastructure.