Software-Defined Networking for Internet of Things: A Survey

Abstract

Internet of things (IoT) facilitates billions of devices to be enabled with network connectivity to collect and exchange real-time information for providing intelligent services. Thus, IoT allows connected devices to be controlled and accessed remotely in the presence of adequate network infrastructure. Unfortunately, traditional network technologies such as enterprise networks and classic timeout-based transport protocols are not capable of handling such requirements of IoT in an efficient, scalable, seamless, and cost-effective manner. Besides, the advent of software-defined networking (SDN) introduces features that allow the network operators and users to control and access the network devices remotely, while leveraging the global view of the network. In this respect, we provide a comprehensive survey of different SDN-based technologies, which are useful to fulfill the requirements of IoT, from different networking aspects—edge, access, core, and data center networking. In these areas, the utility of SDN-based technologies is discussed, while presenting different challenges and requirements of the same in the context of IoT applications. We present a synthesized overview of the current state of IoT development. We also highlight some of the future research directions and open research issues based on the limitations of the existing SDN-based technologies.