Edge-Based Optimal Routing in SDN-Enabled Industrial Internet of Things

The efficiency of communication between devices in any network depends on the network architecture and the routing algorithms. This efficiency vastly affects the productivity of the Internet of Things (IoT) nodes when utilized in an industrial environment. The conundrum of using the conventional network architecture in an industry/factory connected by IoT devices has paved the way for the development of software-defined networking (SDN). Traditional network architectures lack network programmability and hinder the testing and performance evaluation of new communication protocols. The use of vendor-specific hardware is a major hindrance to create a network where the control is centralized for the deployment of different policies over the network. This article aims to find an optimal path for efficient communication between the nodes present in a programmable Industrial IoT (IIoT) network. A programmable IIoT network is created and end-user routing algorithms are designed to find the optimal path for communication. We integrate an SDN framework with IIoT nodes for the creation of a centralized programmable network architecture and deploy custom routing algorithms over it for evaluation. To further reduce the communication latency, we incorporate edge computing servers (ECSs) in the network. Three routing algorithms: 1)
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-means-based optimal path algorithm; 2) cluster-based optimal path algorithm; and 3) minimum interval-based optimal path algorithm, that can be deployed over an SDN are proposed in this article. Experimental results reveal that the proposed algorithms are more efficient than the existing algorithms.