S-MANAGE Protocol For Software-Defined IoT

The Internet of Things (IoT) has started to make a real impact with many IoT-based services in agriculture, smart farming, smart cities, personal health, and critical infrastructures. Sensor/IoT devices form one of the indispensable elements in these IoT systems and services. An effective IoT system requires the interoperability among its heterogeneous physical devices, but this presents a significant challenge regarding various communication protocols, networking management policies, as well as data processing approaches. Software-defined paradigm is considered essential for managing and provisioning IoT services on demand. An emerging solution is the application of software-defined networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) in programming WSN/IoT systems. However, these technologies cannot be directly deployed due to the differences in the functionality of SDN network devices and sensor/IoT devices as well as the limitation of resources in IoT devices. We proposed the software-defined IoT(SD-IoT) model in our earlier work. This paper focuses on the S-MANAGE protocol that enables an SD-IoT controller to control and manage sensor/IoT devices via their virtual representation, called software-defined virtual sensors (SDVS). The paper presents in detail the design and the implementation of the S-MANAGE southbound protocol.