Network softwarization for IoT: A Survey

Internet of Things (IoT) connects billions of devices to provide a variety of services by ensuring the connectivity between different devices and connecting the Internet world. The huge number of connecting devices and objects in IoT increase the challenges, which lead to the necessity of progressive development of IoT system to improve performance and overcome the challenges. For that, the IoT developments may take different ways such as new technologies, standardization, integration with other technologies, and improving the capabilities of IoT devices. Accounting for that consideration, this paper surveys the possibility of leveraging of network softwarization in IoT, which is transforming traditional network processes to the separation between hardware and software by using some enabling network technologies such as Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Network (SDN). NFV aims to increase the virtualization of services by installing and providing network functions on general purpose devices, while SDN decouples control plane from data plane. We have surveyed the concepts of IoT, NFV, SDN, and Network softwarization, and provided a review of the network softwarization in IoT with adopting IoT softwarization architecture.