LoRa-SDN: Providing Wireless IoT Edge Network Functions via SDN

Abstract

Large-scale Internet of Things (IoT) deployments such as smart cities and smart grids are becoming a reality. In these topologies, extensive numbers of wireless devices transmit data to gateways that forward the collected data to back-end systems over a fixed network infrastructure – the core network. It is expected that in the near future the core network will utilize software-defined networking (SDN), as has already happened in data centres and networks of service providers. This enables simplified deployment of network functions and dynamic reactions to observed network conditions. This paper explores how SDN mechanisms can be applied beyond the traditional core network to include wireless IoT edge networks as well. The most popular IoT technology – Long Range (LoRa) – was selected as the main use case technology. The paper describes the LoRa integration with SDN and proposes the LoRa-SDN integration architecture.