Distributed Control Plane Architecture for Software-Defined Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are the basis for several applications including environmental and health monitoring, industrial and home automation, consumer electronics connectivity, and public safety, being a key technology for Internet of Things and Smart Cities development. Software-defined networking (SDN) paradigm could reduce complexity in WSN configuration, management and re-tasking. However the use of a centralized controller increases WSN traffic, decreasing its lifetime. The SDN controller could leverage from the WSN local knowledge to improve the decisions taken. We propose an architecture with distributed and hierarchical controllers, where local controllers use local information to reply to nodes in its area, and a global controller oversees the whole network. We present results from simulations based on emulated sensor nodes.