A Routing Protocol for SDN-based Multi-hop D2D Communications

This paper presents a new Multi-hop Device-to-Device (MD2D) routing protocol, referred to as SMDRP (SDN-based Multi-hop D2D Routing Protocol), for SDN-based wireless networks. Our proposed protocol can be considered as a semi-distributed routing protocol, where an SDN controller manages and controls part of the overall MD2D routing functionality to increase scalability while enabling network operators to control and maintain the out-of-band packet forwarding network. This paper also extends prior work on the Hybrid SDN Architecture for Wireless Distributed Networks (HSAW) [1] and is adapted to the framework presented in this paper. In HSAW, since all link state information is flooded by the controller to the nodes, the network will experience scalability problem. In our approach, this problem is overcome by only passing the next hop for each active route to the mobile nodes. To investigate this, we performed a theoretical and simulation studies comparing HSAW with SMDRP. From our result, it can be seen that for larger density populated networks, SMDRP shows better scalability than HSAW. In addition, mobile nodes need less memory and energy for their communications.