Software-Defined Wireless Sensor Network: A Comprehensive Survey

Software-Defined Networks (SDN), a trending networking technology, offers promising solutions to address the inherent problems of wireless networks, particularly Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). The integration of SDN into WSN ushers in a new networking paradigm known as Software-Defined Wireless Sensor Network (SDWSN). This unification enables WSN to be programmable, configurable, multi-functional, and flexible at run-time. However, it is still in its infancy and encounters a series of challenges, including network management, energy efficiency, controller implementation, placement, and security. This article aims to investigate the state-of-the-art of SDWSN to introduce the reader to its research domains, issues, and open challenges. It first introduces the essential components and their inherent problems, along with various practical applications of SDWSN. The comprehension of SDWSN is centered on three major categories to focus on the issues connected with the controller, network, and energy, which are further classified and compared to grasp their benefits, drawbacks, impact, and importance in SDWSN. The article concludes by discussing the challenges acquired during the development of this survey and the open issues and future research directions that need to be examined in greater depth.