Exploiting SDN to Improve QoS of Smart City Networks Against Link Failures

With continuous urbanization, the smart cities concept aims to utilize the advance in information and communication technologies (ICTs) to ensure the quality of life, enhance the services offered to its inhabitants, and make better use of public services, such as transportation, health care, and education. Software-defined networking (SDN) is a promising solution that aims to simplify network management by separating the control plane from the packet forwarding plane. It allows network administrators to manage the forwarding elements, such as switches, by using the controller, regardless of the vendor specifications. Smart cities consist of heterogeneous devices generating a large volume of data in real-time, which requires more dynamic and efficient network management; thus, integration of SDN and smart cities will enable a simplified, dynamic, and flexible network management system. Link failures due to natural disasters pose a great risk to the performance of the smart city communication network. In this paper, we propose a novel system designed for smart city networks that utilize SDN to provide Quality of Service (QoS) in the face of link failures. We evaluate our proposed system with typical smart city data traffic. The evaluation results show that our proposed system provides better quality service in terms of higher throughput for critical applications during link failures.