SDN Scalability for the Internet of Things (IoT)

In an ever-increasing and expanding world of devices and machines, IoT is required to extend its wings too, in order to connect all of these machines and devices in a single ecosystem. However, scalability of networks is a pain with the ever-growing data requirements and inadequate processing speeds. But with SDN (Software-defined networking) this scale can be expanded and increased to transfer vast amounts of data at a faster rate. Internet of things (IoT) combined with SDN scalability will solve this problem of exchanging a high volume of data that networks are currently facing.

To keep the IoT gateways less complicated, electronics engineers have crafted a way that re-arranges fundamental blocks of SDN and ensures that the data is not only identified and transferred at a faster rate but exchanged in a secure manner. The newly developed Open Level Control (OLC) plane architecture scales up the performance of SDN in case of heavy data flow without altering the central hardware's protocols, tools, and software.

With this newly invented architecture of scaling up the boundary of IoT, engineers have developed a way of combining centralized and distributed architectures together. According to Professor Hamed Al-Raweshidy at Brunel University London, the OLC architecture is the most efficient solution to the scalability problem and can be regarded as the best architecture discovery.  It introduces the open-level distributed-centralized control panel in the SDN network.

The new architectural model divides the SDN framework into two parts – vertical scale as the control panel and horizontal scales as the data panel. Scaling the control panel, in turn, scales the data panel thereby increasing the discovery time. The OLC plane architecture scales up the discovery time by 55.2 percent and cuts the number of discovery packets in the data plan by 84.2 percent.

Professor Hamed Al-Raweshidy adds that the OLC plane architecture can be connected to the internet to inspect its plausibility of dealing with real everyday traffic in the near future. He concludes by stating that the team of electronics engineers, credited with OLC architecture invention, are aiming at implementing a core network prototype using this architecture and testing it across several virtual campus networks.