A new intelligent scheduler to improve reactive OpenFlow communication in SDN-based IoT data streams

Abstract

The significant adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT) has increased the challenges in providing adequate IoT infrastructures meeting essential requirements, such as dynamicity networks and low latency. In this context, the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm and the OpenFlow protocol provide new possibilities for IoT networks. Based on the global view of network elements enabled by the Controller, SDN allows the programmability and control of the infrastructure according to the actual demands of applications. The OpenFlow protocol defines the exchange of messages between controllers and switches, enabling communication and network control. OpenFlow implements three operation modes: proactive, reactive, and hybrid. Due to the dynamic characteristic of the IoT data stream, the reactive mode is mainly used and indicated for IoT environments. As the OpenFlow controller installs rules dynamically, there is no need to know the network’s sources, destinations, and paths in advance. Although reactive mode introduces dynamicity, it can generate additional delay due to switch-controller communication. This delay increases the response time of the IoT data stream. We propose an SDN-IoT scheduler based on Deep Neural Networks (DNN) to predict the time between data stream changes from IoT devices and install rules in advance, suppressing the existing delay in reactive mode. The proposal automatically uses previous data from the IoT data stream to calculate the time of the following communication from IoT devices. Our results indicate that predicting IoT data stream changes and installing OpenFlow rules in advance reduced about 51% of communications response time.