Design a bandwidth allocation framework for SDN based smart home

Abstract

With the increasing number of IoT (Internet of Things) devices and advance of smart home technology, we propose an innovative bandwidth allocation framework for IoT enabled smart homes. The application scope of this research assumes a scenario that an ISP (Internet Service Provider) should support thousands of IoT enabled smart homes for a variety of services. Each smart home is equipped with tens of IoT devices with a wide spectrum of functional capabilities. The proposed bandwidth allocation framework is based on the promising software defined networking (SDN) architecture and is responsible for optimizing bandwidth allocation on both internal home traffic and external Internet traffic. The overall system architecture is separated into SDN Smart Home Cloud and Massive Smart Homes, which are interconnected by OpenFlow protocol. We modify the 3GPP LTE QoS Class Identifier (QCI) to adaptive to the services suitable for smart homes. The proposed bandwidth allocation algorithm considers fairness, delay, and service priority at the same time. With this framework, ISP is able to optimize bandwidth allocation by aggregating thousands of classified services of smart homes and thus effectively enhance Quality of Service (QoS) and user experience (QoE).