SDN-Based Data Forwarding in Fog-Enabled Smart Grids

Data forwarding becomes a challenging issue in fog-enabled smart grids as the size of networks increases. An efficient routing mechanism is required for the fog-enabled smart grids especially for latency-sensitive Internet of Things (IoT) applications. This paper proposes an Software Defined Networking (SDN)-based data forwarding scheme for fog-enabled smart grids. This scheme integrates SDN technology with fog computing, aiming to forward the data with less latency by calculating the shortest path between the source and destination points. To ensure shortest paths, Dijkstra algorithm is employed over different topologies. In addition, for link failures, a path recovery mechanism is realized to ensure uninterrupted data transmission. During the experiments, forwarding time, throughput, and transmission overhead are measured over different topologies. The performance results show that our scheme achieves a better forwarding time performance than existing methods. Also, the forwarding time is affected by the number of link failures but the path recovery is successfully able to sustain the forwarding process. As the topology becomes more complex, throughput and transmission time increase as well.