Towards Distributed SDN: Mobility Management and Flow Scheduling in Software Defined Urban IoT

Abstract

The growth of Internet of Things (IoT) devices with multiple radio interfaces has resulted in a number of urban-scale deployments of IoT multinetworks, where heterogeneous wireless communication solutions coexist (e.g. WiFi, Bluetooth, Cellular). Managing the multinetworks for seamless IoT access and handover, especially in mobile environments, is a key challenge. Software-defined networking (SDN) is emerging as a promising paradigm for quick and easy configuration of network devices, but its application in urban-scale multinetworks requiring heterogeneous and frequent IoT access is not well studied. In this paper we present UbiFlow, the first software-defined IoT system for combined ubiquitous flow control and mobility management in urban heterogeneous networks. UbiFlow adopts multiple controllers to divide urban-scale SDN into different geographic partitions (assigning one controller per partition) and achieve distributed control of IoT flows. A distributed hashing based overlay structure is proposed to maintain network scalability and consistency. Based on this UbiFlow overlay structure, the relevant issues pertaining to mobility management such as scalable control, fault tolerance, and load balancing have been carefully examined and studied. The UbiFlow controller differentiates flow scheduling based on per-device requirements and whole-partition capabilities. Therefore, it can present a network status view and optimized selection of access points in multinetworks to satisfy IoT flow requests, while guaranteeing network performance for each partition. Simulation and realistic testbed experiments confirm that UbiFlow can successfully achieve scalable mobility management and robust flow scheduling in IoT multinetworks; e.g. 67.21% throughput improvement, 72.99% reduced delay, and 69.59% jitter improvements, compared with alternative SDN systems.

A Comprehensive Survey on Mobility Management in 5G Heterogeneous Networks: Architectures, Challenges and Solutions

“…In [96], a software-defined IoT system called UbiFlow is introduced for unified ubiquitous flow control and mobility management in urban HetNets. UbiFlow uses multiple controllers to divide urban-scale SDN into different geographic segments and provide distributed control of IoT flows.…”

Software-Defined Cloud Computing: A Systematic Review on Latest Trends and Developments

“…SLAs are used to identify enterprise level service-level requirements [13]. An SLA includes penalties for noncompliance.…”

“…This has been briefly explained in [6]- [10]. Since their inception, SDCC [11] concepts have addressed several issues related to Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) [11]- [13], DC and cloud computing models [14], [15], value-added network services deployment [16] and network management frameworks [17]- [19].…”

Fast and efficient energy-oriented cell assignment in heterogeneous networks

“…The proposed scheme will be used to solve individual snapshots, where both user positions and their willingness to establish a connection will be updated based on the corresponding mobility and traffic patterns. Other use cases, also leveraged by SDN, such as the one discussed in [28], will be also considered.…”

“…Hence, it is sensible for both techniques to be tightly coordinated in joint solutions [22,1]. In addition, the appearance of new network techniques and architectures, such as SDN [28] and C-RAN [18], will allow the use of more centralized algorithms, which would actually facilitate such tight coordination among the elements of the dense network.…”