SOAP: SDN overlay across providers for IoT cognition services

With the rapid development of cloud computing, big data, robotic cloud and other emerging technologies, more and more intelligent machines and terminals are now embedded with sensors or actuators that need continuous connectivity over the Internet. Terminals attached to the 5G edges are expected to have sophisticated cognitive capabilities to satisfy future IoT services and application. The enabler for such smart services is the capability to establish low throughput connectivity channel across various terminals roaming in the globe to support real time collaborative decisions. Existing mobility protocols and routing standards are inefficient to support such requirement as of their centralized design concept that enforces round trip propagation delay and induces high latency as of excess tunnel headers and signaling overheads. This research establishes a real prototype to illustrate how Software Defined Networking (SDN) can be adopted to automatically established overlay networks over any hybrid infrastructure that can be geographically separated by WAN to provide seamless LAN extension. SOAP overlays identify terminals during the dynamic IP allocation of their join processes and connect them regardless of their location with minimum latency and delay. The overlay network can be expanded cross service providers managed by different SDN controllers. The evaluation of SOAP performance shows strong advancement over existing protocols as of eliminating signaling overheads and restricting tunnel usage to shared paths for connecting WAN separated providers. SOAP ensures wire speed performance inside provider and delivers feasible solution across providers under direct/indirect service level agreements.