A Design for SDN-Based Identifier–Locator Separation Architecture on IoT Networks

Abstract

In upcoming smart urban environments, various things can be interconnected, and the Internet of Things (IoT) can be used to construct a safer and more convenient urban environment. Things in the IoT need an addressing system that can uniquely identify each one; internet protocol (IP) addresses can be used for this purpose. The IP address the two roles of an identifier and a locator. However, this binding has problems related to mobility and multihoming, and it is hard to deploy on a legacy IP system because of some limitations of sensor devices. To solve the problem, we propose a design for software-defined networking (SDN)-based identifier–locator separation architecture on IoT networks. In the proposed scheme, Internet Protocol version 6(IPv6)-based addresses are used for the identifiers and locators. The network is partitioned into a host identity domain for local routing and an IP domain for global routing. The host identity domain operates as an overlaid network over the IP domain, and it makes the unrouteable identifiers routable with a distributed hash table (DHT)-based routing strategy. For the evaluation of the proposed scheme, a packet forwarding cost and signaling cost model is calculated, and the results show that the proposed scheme is conjugable to an IoT network environment.