Software-Defined Networking for Dynamic Control of Mobile Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks

Nowadays the role of mobile nodes, either human workers or robots, in industrial production is becoming increasingly important. Consequently, in Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks (IWSN), alongside with reliability and realtime constraints, mobility support is becoming a compelling requirement. However, providing mobility support in IWSN is quite challenging, as the uncertainty and dynamics of industrial environments, combined with the need for supporting real-time constraints of the data and the mobility of the nodes, complicate routing. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is considered a promising approach for reducing the complexity of network management in many contexts, including industrial automation networks. This paper therefore presents a new SDN approach to handle node mobility and scheduling in IWSN based on the Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) protocol of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. The paper describes the proposed approach, that is called the Forwarding and TSCH Scheduling over SDN (FTS-SDN), and provides simulative performance assessments.