Subneting Software Defined Wireless Sensor Networks to Support Mobility

Mobility in wireless sensor networks plays a significant role in many applications, especially for the internet of things (IoT) and industrial production workflow. However, managing the mobility of nodes in such networks is often problematic mainly because of the dynamics of industrial environments combined with the limitation of the node's resources. Since software-defined networking is a powerful technique to support today's networks' manageability and scalability, both wireless sensor networks and software-defined networks combined are gaining significant interest in research and industry. In this paper, we introduce an approach to handle the mobility and disconnectivity of the sensor nodes in a software-defined network. This approach takes advantage of splitting the network into sub-networks by its address based on subnetting wireless sensor networks (Sub-WSN) and keeping the network topology up to date in the controller by exchanging periodical hello messages. We treat all the nodes in the network as mini controllers and implement an application into the controllers to hand over nodes between the subnets. We evaluated the proposed approach by using Cooja simulator in Contiki. The simulation result yields substantial low control messages, handover time, and latency in handling dynamic networks against a state of the art approach.