An SDN-based publish/subscribe-enabled communication platform for IoT services

Publish/subscribe paradigm paves a way to integrate and serve many scalable, inter-operable Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The increasing IoT applications require new properties of publish/subscribe communication model, for example, strict quality of service (QoS) guarantees, supporting a large number of widely distributed devices, etc. Software Defined Networking (SDN) enables personalized programming and individualized QoS supports for different applications. The combination of the two will have a good prospect. In this paper, we present an IoT-oriented communication platform which combines the publish/subscribe paradigm with SDN, aiming at establishing an IoT ecosystem to facilitate IoT services/applications accessing internet. We design the interaction logic of topic-based publish/subscribe middleware, and describe the setup and maintenance of topology information as well as event routing in detail, considering the characteristics of SDN. Finally, we exemplify its practicability with a deployed District Heating Control and Information Service System (DHCISS) and validity the effectiveness with some experiments.