SDN/NFV-Based Network Infrastructure for Enhancing IoT Gateways
Sinh Do, Luong-Vy Le, Bao‐Shuh Paul Lin, Li‐Ping Tung · 2019
The interconnection of billion smart devices opens new challenges for network integration in Internet of Things (IoT) environments, in which IoT gateways play significant roles as an intermediate component of smart devices and communication networks; therefore, a large amount of data are collected and exchanged via these gateways, whose applications are expected to reduce data processing, storing, and forwarding in IoT networks. On the other hand, recently, SDN/NFV have been considered as emerging technologies and enablers for improving network performance and management due to the full capacities of scalability, flexibility, and elasticity. Hence, applying SDN/NFV for IoT gateways is expected to ease the complexity of the interconnection into the edge network as well as facilitate the interconnection of multiple network protocols, and multiple co-existing tenants on the same physical network. In this paper, firstly, the authors investigate several popular IoT gateways such as NB-IoT and 6LoWPAN to propose a suitable SDN/NFV-based architecture for IoT networks. Secondly, P4 and ONOS controller are used to implement deep programming at the customer side of a network that is suitable for deploying massive IoT environments and developing their applications in the manner of horizontal scalability. Finally, several experiments were demonstrated and implemented in a real NB-IoT gateway, which is a new gateway designed as an outdoor small cell for IoT.