Dynamic Load-Balancing Vertical Control for a Large-Scale Software-Defined Internet of Things

As the global Internet of things (IoT) has grown in popularity with consumers and the business environment, network flow management has become an important topic to optimize the performance of the IoT. The rigid existing IoT architecture blocks current traffic management technology from providing a real differentiated service for the large-scale IoT. The software-defined IoT (SD-IoT), a new computing paradigm that separates the control plane and data plane and enables centralized logic control, offers a feasible method to address these limitations. In this paper, we investigate a vertical structure of the controller pool for the control plane of the SD-IoT; the controller pool includes the controllers (main controllers) of the main control layer and the controllers (basic controllers) of the basic control layer. We then propose a dynamic balancing algorithm of the main controllers based on an election mechanism and a dynamic load balancing algorithm of the basic controller based on the balanced delay model. The experimental results show that the dynamic balancing algorithm based on the election mechanism can ensure consistency of the messages between the main controllers, and the dynamic load balancing algorithm based on the balanced delay model can balance between these different workloads in the basic controllers.