Experimental Assessments and Analysis of an SDN Framework to Integrate Mobility Management in Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks

Industrial wireless sensor networks (IWSN) are expected to support in the near future a wide range of applications in which mobile nodes, for example, robots or humans, interoperate between them and with machinery. However, the real-time constraints imposed by the industrial processing make mobility support quite challenging. This article proposes an approach based on software-defined networking (SDN), herein named forwarding and time-slotted channel hopping scheduling over SDN (FTS-SDN), that handles transmission scheduling and node mobility in IWSN providing bounded end-to-end delays. The article presents the detailed design of the FTS-SDN and the implementation on commercial-off-the-shelf devices. In addition, the FTS-SDN performance are extensively discussed, providing simulation results and experimental measurements obtained in a real scenario.