Adaptation of SDN Framework for a Smart Water Distribution Network in Smart Cities

Traditional network strategies are not proving enough to tackle the huge demand to manage and configure IoT networks. A large number of heterogeneous nodes getting added to the network lead to massive data traffic. Network vendors are already struggling with the control of overloaded networks. This is where Software Defined Network (SDN) as an alternate network management strategy can prove to be vital. SDN enables the virtualization of networks and services, which enables rapid and automatic reconfiguration of network devices, rerouting of traffic, new access rules etc. In this paper, we adapt an SDN framework to fulfill the typical requirements of a Smart Water Distribution network. We set up a Mininet and POX controller-based simulation environment and use them to create a Smart Water Distribution network. We successfully use the simulated network to demonstrate load balancing, firewall, and network re-configuration applications followed by a discussion on future work.