Control Message Quenching-Based Communication Protocol for Energy Management in SDWSN

The rise of the Internet of Things has facilitated the growth of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). WSN has many challenges concerning network and management. It is discovered that Software-Defined Wireless Sensor Networks (SDWSNs) could simplify WSN configuration, routing, and management. However, for obtaining a thorough view of the underlying topology, SDWSN causes many control messages to be exchanged. This consequently depletes the energy of nodes. Wherefore, solving the energy challenges of SDWSN is imperative, before they could be successfully implemented. Realizing this, we propose an architecture that adopts the control message quenching technique in the data layer devices. Based on the proposed architecture, we propose a communication protocol, Control Message Quenching-based SDWSN (CMQ-SDWSN) that facilitates a minimal exchange of control messages between the infrastructure layer and the control layer by placing entry loggers in the data layer. Furthermore, we formulated an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) problem in the control layer which enables better partitioning and distribution of rules. The simulation results show that the proposed architecture and the communication protocol reduce the control message overhead by 33.66% on average and minimize the energy consumption of nodes by 33.51% on average when compared to its counterparts.