EPF-An Efficient Forwarding Mechanism in SDN Controller Enabled Named Data IoTs

Abstract

The vision of the Internet of Things (IoT) is that it connects all kinds of things by leveraging the creation of increasingly affordable and small devices that can be embedded for sensing, processing, wireless communication, and actuation. Named data networking (NDN) is a newly emerging Internet paradigm that may replace the current Internet architecture and that fulfills most of the expectations of the IoT. Software-defined networking (SDN) is an emerging paradigm of technology that is highly capable of managing overall networks efficiently and transforming complex network architectures into manageable, simple ones. The combination of the SDN controller, NDN, and IoT can be lethal in the overall performance of the network. Broadcast storms, due to the flooding nature of NDN's wireless channel, are a serious issue when it comes to forwarding interest and data packets. Energy consumption of sensor nodes in dense IoT scenarios causes problems in forwarding as well as unnecessary delays, decreases network performance, and increases the cost and packet delay for important packets. We took these problems as our baseline and proposed an energy-efficient, priority-based forwarding (EPF) in SDN-enabled NDN-IoT. Our scheme EPF used the efficient flow management of the SDN controller to control the broadcast storm and efficiently forward the priority-based packets. A defer timer mechanism was used to prioritized the packet upon its arrival to the node. An energy threshold mechanism was used to control energy consumption and improve overall energy efficiency. We compared our scheme with the traditional flooding mechanism and geographic interest forwarding; EPF outclassed the other schemes and produced the best results in terms of total number of interests and retransmissions, content retrieval time, total number of priority interests, energy consumption, and network lifetime.