Software-Defined Networking for Internet of Things: A Survey

TLDR

IoT connects billions of devices for real‑time data exchange and remote control, but conventional networks lack the scalability, efficiency, and seamless connectivity required, prompting interest in software‑defined networking (SDN) for its global network view and remote programmability. This survey aims to comprehensively review SDN‑based technologies across edge, access, core, and data‑center networking to meet IoT demands, synthesize the current state of IoT development, and identify future research directions. The authors examine SDN architectures and protocols, evaluating their applicability to IoT scenarios, and discuss the utility, challenges, and requirements of these technologies in various networking layers. The review concludes that SDN can address many IoT requirements, yet challenges such as scalability, security, and integration with legacy systems remain, highlighting key areas for future work.

Abstract

Internet of things (IoT) facilitates billions of devices to be enabled with network connectivity to collect and exchange real-time information for providing intelligent services. Thus, IoT allows connected devices to be controlled and accessed remotely in the presence of adequate network infrastructure. Unfortunately, traditional network technologies such as enterprise networks and classic timeout-based transport protocols are not capable of handling such requirements of IoT in an efficient, scalable, seamless, and cost-effective manner. Besides, the advent of software-defined networking (SDN) introduces features that allow the network operators and users to control and access the network devices remotely, while leveraging the global view of the network. In this respect, we provide a comprehensive survey of different SDN-based technologies, which are useful to fulfill the requirements of IoT, from different networking aspects-edge, access, core, and data center networking. In these areas, the utility of SDN-based technologies is discussed, while presenting different challenges and requirements of the same in the context of IoT applications. We present a synthesized overview of the current state of IoT development. We also highlight some of the future research directions and open research issues based on the limitations of the existing SDN-based technologies.