SDN-Enabled Value-Based Traffic Management Mechanism in Resource-Constrained Sensor Devices

Transmission of data among constrained wireless sensor devices is critical due to its limited resources such as power, bandwidth, memory, and processing. These data, generated from sensing different physical events with diverse traffic types, have to reach their destinations with a specific Quality of Service (QoS) requirement. With the increasing usage of sensors in the various Internet of Things applications, there is a need to address the resource allocation for handling these critical data while satisfying their respective QoS requirements. In this work, we implemented a Value-based Utility traffic management mechanism using Software Defined Networking (SDN) to cope with QoS requirement in constrained sensor devices. The SDN-enabled mechanism ensures that the demands of sensor data are satisfied by managing traffic while allocating queue resources among flows through a centralized controller, which utilizes network packet statistics. We evaluated the performance of the proposed mechanism in a simple and low-cost OpenFlow testbed with various sensor devices having different QoS requirements. Results show that each wireless sensor device achieved the level of satisfaction based on their required resource network utility.