A Software Defined Networking Approach to Improve the Energy Efficiency of Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks

Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks (MWSN) are usually constrained in energy supply, which makes energy efficiency a key factor to extend the network lifetime. The management of the network topology has been widely used as a mechanism to enhance the lifetime of wireless sensor networks (WSN), and this work presents an alternative to this. Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a well-known technology in data center applications that separates the data and control planes during the network management. This paper proposes a solution based on SDN that optimizes the energy use in MWSN. The network intelligence is placed in a controller that can be accessed through different controller gateways within a MWSN. This network intelligence runs a Topology Control (TC) mechanism to build a backbone of coordinator nodes. Therefore, nodes only need to perform forwarding tasks, they reduce message retransmissions and CPU usage. This results in an improvement of the network lifetime. The performance of the proposed solution is evaluated and compared with a distributed approach using the OMNeT++ simulation framework. Results show that the network lifetime increases when 2 or more controller gateways are used.