A Software Defined Wireless Networking for Efficient Communication in Smart Cities

Smart cities represent a rich dynamic environment where multiple wireless mobile devices interconnect to each other to communicate and share their data. The growing demand and the diverse traffic patterns of these smart devices place an increasing strain on the wireless networks. Routing data among wireless routers becomes a challenging issue as traditional routing algorithms, which are based on the Ad-Hoc and LAN flavors, cannot fulfill the requirements of distributed communications in Smart Cities. The routing decisions are taken based on local knowledge of a wireless router about each of its neighbors to reflect a partial visibility of the network. Such a local visibility limits the ability of managing the huge number of wireless smart devices in Smart Cities. An attractive and more realistic alternative is the Software Defined Networking (SDN), which offers a centralized up-to-date view of the entire network by refactoring the wireless protocols into control and forwarding decisions. However, many challenges must first be overcome to realize this potential. Accordingly, this paper outlines important challenging issues for building efficient wireless communication in smart cities. In particular, we describe a novel network architecture that integrates SDN and the Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) to address these issues. Our approach proposes a novel way of performing network virtualization, routing and traffic engineering in SDN-based WMNs in smart cities thereby improving the performance and the flexibility of the network.