SDN-COR: An Efficient Network Coding Opportunistic Routing Method for Software-Defined Wireless Sensor Networks

A Software-Defined Wireless Sensor Networks (SDWSNs) architecture is firstly proposed to address the issues of inflexible architecture strategies and low scalability of traditional WSNs in this article. The SDWSNs architecture involves the design of a software-defined sensor network model and a customized controller architecture, along with an analysis of the functionalities of each management module within the controller architecture. Secondly, to tackle limited energy problem of sensor nodes, a network coding opportunistic routing method (SDN-COR) is presented based on SDWSNs. This method incorporates considerations of coding opportunities, vertical distance, and remaining energy of nodes to design a metric for encoding opportunistic routing. By combining opportunistic forwarding mechanisms, candidate forwarding sets are selected and sorted based on priority to prioritize data transmission by higher-priority nodes. Simulation results indicate that, comparing with conventional methods, this approach achieves reduction in energy consumption by an average of 21.5%, improves network throughput by 24%, and extends network lifetime by 20%.