An Energy-Aware SDN/NFV Architecture for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an essential component of emerging network applications like smart cities, where billions of IoT devices are connected to transport massive network traffic. A programmable network such as software-defined networking (SDN) can cope with such data explosion and constrained network resources. Furthermore, Network Function Virtualization (NFV) can enable on-demand network functions deployment. Thus, SDN and NFV can complement each other to empower an architecture for the IoT. In this paper, we first design an SDN/NFV enabled IoT node for dynamic deployment of network functions. The proposed IoT node is then used to develop an SDN/NFV architecture to realize on-demand network functions like data aggregation. Next, we define an Integer Linear programming (ILP) problem to optimize the energy consumption of the IoT nodes by activating an optimal number of NFV nodes and optimally assigning regular nodes to those activated NFV nodes. Finally, we design a heuristic and evaluate it in the Cooja simulator. Extensive evaluation confirms that the proposed solution outperforms its counterparts in communication energy consumption and packet delivery ratio.