Performance evaluation of SDN-enabled switching system for IoT infrastructure

Abstract

The revolution of the Internet of Things (IoT) has had a major impact on the infrastructure of networks and information technology. Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a way to enhance infrastructure agility and thus facilitate dynamic and scalable design, delivery and operation of network services. It is therefore believed that the agility brought about by network programming or SDN is essential to address the IoT revolution which is pushing the infrastructure to its limit with numerous and diverse requirements to meet. IoT nodes usually depend on the network layers to communicate with each other. However, it is almost impossible to construct a single end-to-end infrastructure that addresses the whole set of IoT constraints. The objective of this project is thus to share components in a converged layer where Raspberry acts as an IoT gateway as well as SDN enabled device that can satisfy various IoT requirements. Raspberry Pi has been a common IoT commodity for quite a few years now and is targeted to be redesigned for additional networking functionality. The most recent version # 4 of Raspberry Pi has been installed with a very well-known virtual Open vSwitch. The Raspberry Pi serves as the data path of network communication throughout the project with SDN controller Ryu operating on the Raspberry Pi to provide programmability. A system of wired, wireless and SDN networks combined is then designed to validate the operations of the Raspberry Pi. After successful functionality, the Raspberry Pi is then evaluated in terms of QoS parameters (bandwidth, packet loss, delay and jitter) to ensure the suitability of Raspberry Pi utilized as a common device for both IoT and SDN operations.