Towards Unified Control of Networks of Switches and Sensors through a Network Operating System

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are an integral part of an Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem. In fact, a typical IoT service deployment considers an integrated network of switches and sensors (as well as actuators). In order to manage this heterogeneous network infrastructure, the use of Software Defined Networking (SDN) technologies is anticipated. However, existing SDN-enabling technologies consider only isolated networks and there has been no concrete solution that treats the whole network in a unified way. In this paper, a Network Operating System is proposed as a way to address the above issue. Starting from the Open Network Operating System (ONOS), which currently supports only OpenFlow networks, the proposed solution leverages SDN-WISE to integrate WSNs and achieves unified system representation and treatment. The proposed system has been prototyped and is publicly available in open source. Experiments have been executed demonstrating that, by exploiting the proposed solution, it is also possible to improve efficiency of the overall network.