Towards Control Message Quenching for SDWSN: A State of the Art Overview

Abstract

The deployment of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has rapidly expanded with the widespread implementation of the internet of things (IoT) technologies. However, traditional WSNs are resource-constrained and offer rigidity in network management especially with wide-scale implementation. Software-defined networking (SDN) based on the provision of a centralised controller promises to improve flexibility and ease of managing large scale WSNs. This has been made possible through the separation of the control intelligence from the data forwarding infrastructure of network devices. However, SDN-based implementation comes at a cost of control overhead traffic which is a performance bottleneck to WSNs due to the limited in-band traffic channel bandwidth associated with WSNs. This has driven the research community to look into methods of effectively reducing the overhead control traffic in a process known as control message quenching (CMQ). This paper provides a state of the art overview of control traffic reduction techniques available and being implemented for SDNbased WSNs. It provides an insight of benefits, challenges and open research areas available in the ifeld of control message quenching in SDN-based WSN. This paper opens the door to this widely unexplored research area in its current form.