Improving northbound interface communication in SDWSN

Abstract

Software-Defined Wireless Sensor Networking (SDWSN) is an emerging paradigm that seeks to alleviate the inherent resource constraint issues present in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) by adopting a Software-Defined Networking (SDN) approach to the management of WSN. This SDWSN paradigm is said to play a crucial role in both the developing Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm and the development of smart city grids. The northbound and southbound SDWSN interfaces are important for realizing efficient network understanding and programmability, however there has been a lack of attention towards the northbound interface as most work done has been surrounding the southbound interface. Therefore some work is needed to improve the northbound interface so that it may allow for a better degree of network programmability. In order to achieve network programmability and automation, there is a need for a metadata based Application Programming Interface (API). The work done in this paper seeks to improve the northbound interface communications by addressing the issue of a metadata in REST as well as identifying potential platforms for the development of a metadata framework.