Toward integrating software defined networks with the Internet of Things: a review

Mohammed Al Ja'afreh; Hikmat Adhami; Alaa Eddin Alchalabi; Mohamed Hoda; Abdulmotaleb El Saddik

doi:10.1007/s10586-021-03402-4

Toward integrating software defined networks with the Internet of Things: a review

Cluster Comput. 2022;25(3):1619-1636. doi: 10.1007/s10586-021-03402-4. Epub 2021 Sep 7.

Authors

Mohammed Al Ja'afreh¹, Hikmat Adhami¹, Alaa Eddin Alchalabi¹, Mohamed Hoda², Abdulmotaleb El Saddik¹

Affiliations

¹ EECS, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada.
² College of the North Atlantic, Doha, Qatar.

Abstract

Due to the outbreak of Covid-19 pandemic, activities in most sectors- be it business, education or even healthcare- are taking place in an online rather than in an inline style, and as a result, Internet traffic has increased drastically. Recent studies have highlighted that internet traffic has grown by 70% to 300% since March 2020. According to a recent CNN news article (https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/19/tech/netflix-internet-overload-eu/index.html), popular content providers such as Netflix and YouTube are slowing down in North-America and Europe to keep the internet from breaking. With that being addressed, the existing network deployment and solutions, even with the fifth generation mobile communication (5G) partial deployment, are currently under a huge burden. This work intends to review the integration of two of the most innovative network research areas, Software-defined Networks (SDN) and the Internet of Things (IoT). The IoT aims to interface questions over the Internet while the SDN offers orchestration for network management by decoupling the control plane and the data plane. In this article, we present the state of the art of Software-defined networking and the Internet of Things discussing the integrated architectures, challenges, and designs. Also, we discuss two proposals targeting the QoS Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in IoT via SDN mobile edge computing along with a few directions of possible research that could fill in gaps in these domains.

Keywords: 5G; Internet of Things (IoT); Key Performance Indicators (KPIs); Ontology; OpenFlow; Quality of Service (QoS); SWAY; Software defined networks (SDN); Tactile Internet (TI).