Dynamic Load-Balancing Vertical Control for Large-Scale Software-Defined Internet of Things

As the global Internet of things increasingly is popular with consumers and business environment, network flow management has become an important topic to optimize the performance on Internet of Things. The rigid existing Internet of things (IoT) architecture blocks current traffic management technology to provide a real differentiated service for large-scale IoT. Software-defined Internet of Things (SD-IoT) is a new computing paradigm that separates control plane and data plane, and enables centralized logic control. In this paper, we first present a general framework for SD-IoT, which consists of two main components: SD-IoT controllers and SD-IoT switches. The controllers of SD-IoT uses resource pooling technology, and the pool is responsible for the centralized control of the entire network. The switches of SD-IoT integrate with the gateway functions, which is responsible for data access and forwarding. The SD-IoT controller pool is designed as a vertical control architecture, which includes the main control layer and the base control layer. The controller (main controller) of the main control layer interacts upward with the application layer, interacts with the base control layer downwards, and the controller (base controller) of the basic control layer interacts with the data forwarding layer. We propose a dynamic balancing algorithm of the main controller based on election mechanism and a dynamic load balancing algorithm of the basic controller based on the balanced delay, respectively. The experimental results show that the dynamic balancing algorithm based on the election mechanism can ensure the consistency of the messages between the main controllers, and the dynamic load balancing algorithm based on the balanced delay can balance between these different workloads in the basic controllers. L. Zhang ([email protected]), X. Zhong and Y. Wei ([email protected]) are with Key Laboratory of Internet of Things Technology and Application, College of Physics and Information Science, Hunan Normal University, Changsha, China. K. Yang ([email protected]) is with the School of Computer Sciences and Electrical Engineering, University of Essex, CO4 3SQ, Colchester, UK.