Bandwidth Management Framework for Smart Homes Using SDN : ISP Perspective

Abstract

With the increasing number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and the advance of smart home technologies, not only smart environments like smart homes, smart cities and smart countries become feasible, but also all these devices consume more or less bandwidth in data transmission. In this paper, we propose an SDN (Software Defined Networking) based QoS (Quality of Service) aware bandwidth management framework for thousands of IoT enabled smart homes from ISP perspective. The operational scenario of this research assumes that an ISP should support thousands of smart homes. Each smart home equips with tens of IoT devices with a broad spectrum of functional capabilities, and each smart home exploits a variety of services. The overall system architecture consists of into SDN Smart Home Cloud at ISP side, and massive SDN enabled Smart Homes. The Smart Home Cloud interconnects with Smart Homes through OpenFlow protocol. With this architecture, we first prioritized smart home services into categories by adapting 3GPP LTE QoS Class Identifier (QCI). Then we propose a Bandwidth Allocation for Smart Home (BASH) strategy to calculate appropriate bandwidth for each service category according to distinct QoS requirements. ISP can thus use BASH to optimize bandwidth allocation of aggregated and classified services of smart homes. The experiments are conducted under an SDN-based network environment constructed by Linux based OpenvSwitch, Ryu controller, and Mininet. The experiment results show that the proposed framework can effectively enhance QoS and outperform the traditional ISP bandwidth allocation strategy in terms of average transfer ratio, average throughput, average delay and average jitter.