Performance Evaluation of SDN-WISE in Mobile Wireless Sensors Networks

Abstract

Wireless Sensors Networks (WSNs) are the backbone of numerous IoT applications such as smart homes, smart cities, smart farming, smart health, and weather monitoring. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging communication paradigm that aims to facilitate the management of WSNs and extend their lifetime by shifting the heavy and energy consuming task of routing from sensors to a powerful and unlimited energy server, named the controller. SDN-WISE is a popular SDN implementation for WSNs. This framework has been evaluated and tested in static WSNs where the sensors have fixed positions. However, most IoT applications incorporate mobile nodes such as robots, self-driving cars, and unmanned aerial vehicles, hence the need of evaluating this framework in mobile WSNs. In this paper, we implement mobility scenarios in SDN-WISE. We then conduct an analysis of the performance of SDN-WISE in both static and mobile scenarios. Our simulation results reveal that SDN-WISE achieves a poor performance in mobile WSNs compared to the static counterparts. This stresses the urgent need to develop efficient routing protocols to handle mobility in SDN-WISE.