Pangu: Towards a Software-Defined Architecture for Multi-function Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Software-defined networking (SDN) is deemed as a promising direction to offer generalizability of wireless sensor networks (WSN). To introduce SDN into WSNs, however, means a series of non-trivial challenges due to the wireless and ad-hoc nature of WSNs. In this paper, we present our study towards a software-defined architecture for multi-function wireless sensor networks. Our proposal called Pangu is built upon the opportunistic routing protocol stack and introduces the concept of modality properties of sensor nodes. It enables centralized network control over a WSN while preserving the flexibility of underlying ad-hoc routing. We tackle the critical problems of the architecture design by presenting three essential components of Pangu. Moreover, we implement Pangu on a real-world testbed and evaluate it with various experiments.