Design and Implementation of SDN-based 6LBR with QoS Mechanism over Heterogeneous WSN and Internet

Recently, the applications of Internet of Things (IoTs) are growing rapidly. Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) becomes an emerging technology to provide the low power wireless connectivity for IoTs. The IPv6 over low-power wireless personal area networks (6LoWPAN) has been proposed by IETF, which gives each WSN device an IPv6 address to connect with the Internet. The transmission congestion in IoTs could be a problem when a large numbers of sensors are deployed in the field. Therefore, it is important to consider whether the WSN devices have be completely integrated into the Internet with proper quality of service (QoS) requirements. The Software Defined Network (SDN) is a new architecture of network decoupling the data and control planes, and using the logical centralized control to manage the forwarding issues in large-scale networks. In this research, the SDN-based 6LoWPAN Border Router (6LBR) is proposed to integrate the transmission from WSNs to Internet. The proposed SDN-based 6LBR communicating between WSNs and the Internet will bring forward the requirements of end-to-end QoS with bandwidth guarantee. Based on our experimental results, we have observed that the selected 6LoWPAN traffic flows achieve lower packet loss rate in the Internet. Therefore, the 6LoWPAN traffic flows classified by SDN-based 6LBR can be reserved for the required bandwidth in the Internet to meet the QoS requirements.