Experimental Assessments and Analysis of an SDN Framework to Integrate Mobility Management in Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks

Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks (IWSN) are expected to support in the near future a wide range of applications in which mobile nodes, for example robots or humans, interoperate between them and with machinery. However, the real-time constraints imposed by the industrial processing make mobility support quite challenging. This paper proposes an approach based on Software Defined Networking, herein named Forwarding and TSCH Scheduling over SDN (FTS-SDN), that handles transmission scheduling and node mobility in IWSN providing bounded end-to-end delays. The paper presents the detailed design of the FTS-SDN and the implementation on commercial-off-the-shelf devices. In addition, the FTS-SDN performance are extensively discussed, providing simulation results and experimental measurements obtained in a real scenario.