Software Defined Network for Energy Efficiency in IoT and RPL Networks

Abstract Today's most significant developing technology is the Internet of Things (IoT), and investigating it is a hot issue in information technology. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in RFC6550 defined the IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL), one of the IoT's core routing protocols, and it is the only standard protocol that assists the routing process in Low Power and Lossy Networks (LLNs) of IoT applications. LLNs are connecting smart devices to the Internet to monitor, control, or exchange data. These smart devices are tiny with limited battery capacity and power supply, and it is suffering from excessive energy consumption. This network issue may be addressed with innovative flexible network topology using Software-Defined networks. Our work proposes an (LBC-NDFA) algorithm for software-defined RPL networks to reduce the number of RPL control messages and increase energy efficiency using a Limit based Broadcast Control (LBC) approach that modified the Destination Oriented Directed Acyclic Graph (DODAG) Information Object (DIO) control message format and used the Non-Deterministic Finite Automata (NDFA) algorithm to determine whether a DIO message needs to be broadcasted. Using network simulator NS3, we assess the results. The results of our experiments show the viability of our proposal with decreased control overhead, and control messages, and reduced energy consumption by 40% and 60% with compared works.