Using Software-Defined Networking for Data Traffic Control in Smart Cities with WiFi Coverage

The growth of smart cities is fueled by the vast rise in wireless gadgets and uninterrupted connectivity. WiFi dominant technology, enabling Internet-of-Things (IoT) connectivity due to its ubiquitous access points low deployment cost. However, city applications offer a wide range services with different quality-of-service (QoS) demands. This paper addresses packet delivery latency as one QoS metrics affecting many time-sensitive services. Thus, proposes employing software-defined networking (SDN) control traffic load (APs), preserving symmetry city-wide coverage WiFi-connected IoT gateways or fog nodes. These receive data packets from city/IoT devices via links forward them over city-deployed network their management entities servers. Three SDN-based algorithms are devised reduce gateways’ packet-forwarding delay keep symmetric at APs. developed tested using real hardware setup constituting without additional requirements on (WiFi clients) APs, such support for specific roaming protocol bandwidth-consuming signaling sending probe packets. Extensive experimentation shows that SDN controller, proposed algorithms, can effectively forwarding carefully selecting gateway highest seamlessly handing it least-loaded covering AP.