SD-EAR: Energy Aware Routing in Software Defined Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

In today's internet-of-things (IoT) environment, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have many advantages, with broad applications in different areas including environmental monitoring, maintaining security, etc. However, high energy depletion may lead to node failures in WSNs. In most WSNs, nodes deplete energy mainly because of the flooding and broadcasting of route-request (RREQ) packets, which is essential for route discovery in WSNs. The present article models wireless sensor networks as software-defined wireless sensor networks (SD-WSNs) where the network is divided into multiple clusters or zones, and each zone is controlled by a software-defined network (SDN) controller. The SDN controller is aware of the topology of each zone, and finds out the optimum energy efficient path from any source to any destination inside the zone. For destinations outside of the zone, the SDN controller of the source zone instructs the source to send a message to all of the peripheral nodes in that zone, so that they can forward the message to the peripheral nodes in other zones, and the process goes on until a destination is found. As far as energy-efficient path selection is concerned, the SDN controller of a zone is aware of the connectivity and residual energy of each node. Therefore, it is capable of discovering an optimum energy efficient path from any source to any destination inside as well as outside of the zone of the source. Accordingly, flow tables in different routers are updated dynamically. The task of route discovery is shifted from individual nodes to controllers, and as a result, the flooding of route-requests is completely eliminated. Software-defined energy aware routing (SD-EAR)also proposes an innovative sleeping strategy where exhausted nodes are allowed to go to sleep through a sleep request-sleep grant mechanism. All of these result in huge energy savings in SD-WSN, as shown in the simulation results.

Dynamic Control Architecture Based on Software Defined Networking for the Internet of Things

“…Software defined energy aware routing (SD-EAR) proposed in [24] divides the sensor network into clusters with a SDN Controller associated to each cluster, where Controllers know the topologies of the associated cluster as well as of the border nodes. Each Controller evaluates the best path from the source to destination if the destination falls in its area or, alternatively, it can send a request to discover the route to destination, taking into account the residual energy of nodes.…”

A hybrid Meta-heuristic solution for Energy-Efficient routing in Software-Defined Wireless Sensor Network 

“…SDN-ECCKN [26] approach for improving network life-time by implementing effective sleeping strategy at the controller in order to achieve reduced transmission time of the network. Further, SD-EAR [27], a path selection approach is implemented on MININET for intracluster (zone) and inter-cluster communication that offers a sleeping strategy for energy preservation in SD-WSNs and achieve good network performance over some non-WSN based protocols. The idea of SD-WSN is to minimize energyconsumption by automatic switching [28] and load balancing [29], management task at the SDN controller.…”

Proposition and Real-Time Implementation of an Energy-Aware Routing Protocol for a Software Defined Wireless Sensor Network

“…After establishing the flow table, the controller sends to each node directly, which is impractical in a large network. An SD-EAR energy aware routing algorithm [39] is designed to reduce the flooding and broadcasting issue of WSN network. The authors divide the network into a different zone and each zone is handled by the SDN controller, but the selection of the zone head is vague.…”