Energy-efficient clustering and routing algorithm for large-scale SDN-based IoT monitoring

In the context of large-scale Internet of Things (IoT), one of the main issues comes from the lack of an efficient routing protocol that could handle thousands of devices and provide a low-power forwarding mechanism for huge amounts of data. Furthermore, this routing protocol should cope with the intrinsic device-to-device communications paradigm of IoT, where nodes no longer need an intermediate station for communication and synchronizing, in order to exploit all options to deliver a better quality of service (QoS) for the network. Although many solutions have been proposed to meet QoS requirements for various applications based on IoT, they usually do not provide significant increase on a network performance when the number of nodes becomes too large. Therefore, in this work, we provide a new modelling paradigm, organized on a two-level control mechanism, to overcome this problem. For the first level, we propose a new Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) approach based on multi-hop clustering technique (MHC-RPL). It is used as a local control to organize nodes in clusters, in order to reduce energy consumption in the IoT. The second level uses Software Defined Networking (SDN) with Q-routing algorithm for intelligent management of the global network. Our results show that the proposed model provides significant better results in terms of end-to-end delay, packet delivery ratio and energy-consumption than current state-of-the-art.