Reliable and Resilient Communication in Duty Cycled Software Defined Wireless Sensor Networks

Reliable and resilient network communication with flexible management is one of the significant issues in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Due to the substantial packet loss, energy usage, and inadequate security of WSNs, the reliable data delivery is necessary when using multi-hop data communication. This paper employs the software-defined networking (SDN) concept to provide flexible and effective management with reliability in network communication. Therefore, it proposes a reliable and resilient communication in duty cycled software defined wireless sensor networks that addresses two parts. First, it considers the four attributes with their probability distributions to provide reliability and resilience in data plane communication. The attributes are direct trust, recommended trust, signal to interference noise ratio, and residual energy. Second, the SDN controller computes those attributes along with the Expected Duty Cycled Wake-ups (EDC) to make it more reliable and assigns communication strategies to each node through the reliable nodes. It also restricts the number of forwarding nodes for each node in order to minimize packet duplication. The simulation results indicate that, when compared to state-of-the-art protocols, the proposed protocol greatly enhances the reliability and resilience of the network.