Whispering to Industrial IoT for converging multi-domain Network Programmability

Abstract

Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) calls for not only highly reliable, quasi-deterministic and low-power networks, but also for more flexible and programmable networks to cope with operator's dynamics demands. Software Defined Networking (SDN) offers the high levels of flexibility and programmability that traditional distributed protocols cannot offer. In between a fully centralized SDN-on-IoT management solution and a traditional fully distributed one, Whisper stands out as a trade-off solution that has the robustness, scalability and low-overhead of distributed solutions and the flexibility and programmability of centralized ones. In this demo we present a hands-on experience of how Whisper can be jointly used with traditional SDN solutions, such as ONOS, in order to extend the already existing network programmability in wired domains to 6TiSCH-based Industrial IoT segments. We deploy and test such architecture in real-world large-scale testbeds and demonstrate to be feasible and beneficial to provide an efficient and programmable end-to-end control over a heterogeneous network.