SDN-TSCH: Enabling Software Defined Networking for Scheduled Wireless Networks with Traffic Isolation

Abstract

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications need to rely on a wireless infrastructure able to provide low end-to-end latency, and high reliability. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is promising to make the network more agile, pushing the decision process to a controller. However, radio links are unstable while the controller needs to construct an accurate view of the network to schedule the transmissions efficiently. We propose here SDN-TSCH to separate the data and control planes for a scheduled network. We construct a reliable control plane, maintaining a collision-free path to and from the controller. Besides, SDN-TSCH guarantees flow isolation: each flow can reserve dedicated resources so that end-to-end reliability and latency constraints can be respected per flow. Finally, we also dedicate resources for best-effort traffic, to accommodate various applications. Our Cooja simulations highlight the flow isolation characteristics of SDN-TSCH: we provide very high reliability even in presence of best-effort traffic.

A Link-Quality Anomaly Detection Framework for Software-Defined Wireless Mesh Networks

“…Estimating wireless link quality is a central problem in the field of wireless networks, including IoTs and WMNs [19] - [20], while its importance is also highlighted for SDN-based wireless networks [21] - [22]. A vast amount of algorithms have been proposed for link quality detection, spanning from statistical based procedures to machine learning (ML) approaches and deep-learning procedures.…”

“…(19) 8: ; T on : on-line test statistic, eq. (19) 9: ; cv on : on-line detector's critical value, eq (21).…”

Towards a Fully Programmable Internet of Things

“…However, it relies on a typical match/action pipeline that prevents the controller from having complete control of the communication stack of the nodes. SDN-TSCH [4] allows a controller to define the TSCH schedule regarding the application needs and guarantees flow isolation. However, this solution is dedicated to scheduled networks and does not expose basic MAC/network primitives to the controller.…”

“…We will employ the term programmability when referring to the ability to modify the behavior of a device through the wireless medium. Programmable networks have different scales, ranging from solutions focusing on changing the whole firmware of a node Over-The-Air (OTA) [3] to solutions that make the data plane programmable [4].…”

“…Current SDN approaches for IOT are limited in the sense that most of the MAC layer operations are still viewed as a monolithic block from the controller. For example, the controller can modify a TSCH schedule on the fly, as proposed in [4], but it has no control over the intra-timeslot organization, retransmission, carrier sense, etc.…”