Conceptualization of Software Defined Network layers over internet of things for future smart cities applications

Abstract

With recent advancements of Information and Communication technologies (ICT), Internet of things (IoT) development has just started creating a significant value across people, processes and organizations. There are numbers of applications across energy, transportation and public safety sectors that have linked with economic growth in GDP and therefore, governments are taking serious actions to enhance ICT and IoT penetration across their countries and achieve economies of scale. In future, it can be easily anticipated to meet growing demand, IoT applications scale will reach to millions of sensor devices in a few sq. kilometers area in order to transform traditional cities towards smart cities and accommodate the urbanization pressures. With the growing demand of data hungry devices and deployment of millions of sensors in a certain place will eventually increase size of information and data transmission flow through the sensor devices itself and infrastructure network nodes and then millions of IP addresses will be needed to provide connectivity. Wireless Sensor Networks implementation under internet of things context likely to approach limitations of network bandwidth availability and the cost of IoT infrastructure will be extremely high if dedicated network resources deployed therefore this paper proposed the innovative architecture using Software Defined Networks (SDN) to provide on demand and efficient network resources for low power wireless personal area network (6LowPAN) devices. This proposed architecture model will also strengthen the applications of IoT in either side i.e. control and monitoring.