An architecture for QoS-aware service deployment in software-defined IoT networks

One of the major challenges in Internet of Things (IoT) will be management and orchestration of multi-technology/multi-vendor network environments. According to many stakeholders, the adoption of software defined networking (SDN) principles in 5G (5-th Generation) wireless networks will allow the integration of mobile networks and the internet of things and will make it possible to manage billions of connected smart objects through intelligent orchestration and provisioning systems. The special value of SDN lies its ability to support network virtualization and to automate deployment of new services on top of the virtualized network infrastructure. To pave the way towards this novel approach, we present a SDN-based architecture for virtualization of IoT networks, including an intent-based north-bound interface and a virtualized infrastructure manager, allowing virtualization of IoT resources. The architecture exploits SDN controller to program different IoT networks in order to provide to users the intended service at the requested level of quality. A prototype of the architecture is presented and numerical results related to round trip time, measured at the different levels of the architecture, are reported.