Cross-layer QoS enabled SDN-like publish/subscribe communication infrastructure for IoT

Publish/subscribe paradigm is often adopted to create the communication infrastructure of the Internet of Things (IoT) for many clients to access enormous real-time sensor data. However, most current publish/subscribe middlewares are based on traditional ossified IP networks, which are difficult to enable Quality of Service (QoS). How to design the next generation publish/subscribe middleware has become an urgent problem. The emerging Software Defined Networking (SDN) provides new opportunities to improve the QoS of publish/subscribe facilities for delivering events in IoT owing to its customized programmability and centralized control. We can encode event topics, priorities and security policies into flow entries of SDN-enabled switches to satisfy personalized QoS needs. In this paper, we propose a cross-layer QoS enabled SDN-like publish/subscribe communication infrastructure, aiming at building an IoT platform to seamlessly connect IoT services with SDN networks and improving the QoS of delivering events. We first present an SDN-like topic-oriented publish/subscribe middleware architecture with a cross-layer QoS control framework. Then we discuss prototype implementation, including topic management, topology maintenance, event routing and policy management. In the end, we use differentiated services and cross-layer access control as cross-layer QoS scenarios to verify the prototype. Experimental results show that our middleware is effective.