LCD: Light‐weight control model for data plane in software‐defined wireless sensor networks

With the introduction of software‐defined networking (SDN) into wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to simplify network management and increase agility, software‐defined WSNs (SDWSNs) came into being. Since SDN adopts an idea of centralized control, reliable control is a necessary guarantee of its performance. However, in SDWSN, the unreliable wireless links pose a significant challenge to the reliable control of data plane. In view of this, this paper adopts the idea of separating the forwarding process of control flow and data flow and presents a light‐weight control model for data plane in SDWSN. Based on the network global view, the model constructs an independent control forwarding layer to route control flow. The light‐weight feature of this model lies in that there is no need to deploy additional control networks. Finally, we design a fast update algorithm for the control failure that may occur by searching for the replacement of neighboring control nodes and achieve efficient maintenance of the control forwarding layer. The simulation results show that the proposed model has shorter request‐response time than the original SDN‐WISE, and the impact on data plane forwarding performance is also within the acceptable range.