# Atomic-SDN: Is Synchronous Flooding the Solution to Software-Defined Networking in IoT?

## TL;DR

Atomic-SDN introduces a novel synchronous flooding architecture to enhance SDN control in low-power IoT networks, achieving significant improvements in latency, reliability, and energy efficiency over existing solutions.

## Contribution

The paper proposes Atomic-SDN, a new SDN solution utilizing dynamic synchronous flooding to meet complex control requirements in low-power wireless IoT environments.

## Key findings

- Atomic-SDN significantly reduces control latency.
- Atomic-SDN improves reliability in low-power networks.
- Atomic-SDN enhances energy efficiency for IoT SDN control.

## Abstract

The adoption of Software Defined Networking (SDN) within traditional networks has provided operators the ability to manage diverse resources and easily reconfigure networks as requirements change. Recent research has extended this concept to IEEE 802.15.4 low-power wireless networks, which form a key component of the Internet of Things (IoT). However, the multiple traffic patterns necessary for SDN control makes it difficult to apply this approach to these highly challenging environments. This paper presents Atomic-SDN, a highly reliable and low-latency solution for SDN in low-power wireless. Atomic-SDN introduces a novel Synchronous Flooding (SF) architecture capable of dynamically configuring SF protocols to satisfy complex SDN control requirements, and draws from the authors' previous experiences in the IEEE EWSN Dependability Competition: where SF solutions have consistently outperformed other entries. Using this approach, Atomic-SDN presents considerable performance gains over other SDN implementations for low-power IoT networks. We evaluate Atomic-SDN through simulation and experimentation, and show how utilizing SF techniques provides latency and reliability guarantees to SDN control operations as the local mesh scales. We compare Atomic-SDN against other SDN implementations based on the IEEE 802.15.4 network stack, and establish that Atomic-SDN improves SDN control by orders-of-magnitude across latency, reliability, and energy-efficiency metrics.