HIC: A high-reliable in-band control network for perception layer of software-defined IoT

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the popularity of the software-defined idea, the software-defined Internet of Things (SD-IoT) came into being. However, the transmission conflict between control flow and data flow in the perception layer with poor channel resources has become an important constraint for SD-IoT. Thus, this paper adopts the idea of isolated forwarding control flow based on an in-band channel, that is, selecting some sensor nodes to be responsible for forwarding control flow, and proposes high-reliable in-band control network (HIC), a high-reliability in-band control network. In order to support real-time tasks in the IoT environment, HIC adopts a divided control area to support parallel responses of multiple partially overlapping tasks. Further, in each control area, the graph theory is used to model the control node selection problem, and an algorithm for efficiently solving the model is designed based on the community detection method. Finally, we developed the HIC experimental platform composed of HIC-topology and HIC-simulation and carried out simulation experiments and analysis from topology generation, maintenance, and operation. The experimental results show that HIC could better adapt to the SD-IoT under multi-task deployment, and has great advantages in terms of the success rate and time of topology rapid maintenance compared with similar solutions.