Network-Balanced Algorithm Based on Hierarchical Subnet Space for Software-Defined Wireless Sensor Networks

Software defined wireless sensor network (SDWSN) is a new network architecture for sensor networks. It provides an information monitoring and management technology solution for wireless sensor network, and has become a research hot spot in recent years. Despite the advantages of SDWSN, there are still some unavoidable problems such as over concentrated load and imbalanced energy consumption with the increase of network scale. To deal with the shortages of load and energy balance in SDWSN, we propose a new hierarchical subnet space based network balance algorithm. The proposed algorithm innovatively optimizes the network structure and forwarding rules of SDWSN. Fog computing is also applied to reduce packet transmission requirement, which helps to further balance load and reduce energy consumption. In our optimized network structure, the whole network is divided into several subnets and sub-controllers are selected for each subnet. Sensor data packets are collected and compressed in the sub-controller and sent to the center controller along the path consisted of sun-controllers. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithm performs better than other existed algorithms in load balancing and energy saving.