SCONN: Design and Implement Dual-Band Wireless Networking Assisted Fault Tolerant Data Transmission in Intelligent Buildings

IoT devices monitor and provide information to a control system which manages the operation of an intelligent building. Due to the limited capability of wireless coverage and battery life, IoT devices may have not direct Internet access to the control system. Instead, they first connect to WiFi access points (APs) for data transmission. However, when abnormal situation such as attacks occurs, the performance of packet transmission between the IoT devices and the control system degrade. To eliminate this problem, we utilize the dual-band wireless networking technology and propose a Stay Connected (SCONN) mechanism. When the software defined networking (SDN) controller detects the abnormal situation occurs between an AP and the control system, with SCONN, packets will be adaptively rerouted through the backup wireless mesh network consisted by dual-band APs. Hence, the performance in data transmission can be enhanced. To further validate the capability of SCONN, we implement it in commercial APs. Experimental results show the improvement of the proposed SCONN to support data transmission.