Whisper: Programmable and Flexible Control on Industrial IoT Networks

Software Defined Networking (SDN) centralizes network control to improve network programmability and flexibility. Contrary to wired settings, it is unclear how to support SDN in low power and lossy networks like typical Internet of Things (IoT) ones. Challenges encompass providing reliable in-band connectivity between the centralized controller and out-of-range nodes, and coping with physical limitations of the highly resource-constrained IoT devices. In this work, we present Whisper, an enabler for SDN in low power and lossy networks. The centralized Whisper controller of a network remotely controls nodes’ forwarding and cell allocation. To do so, the controller sends carefully computed routing and scheduling messages that are fully compatible with the protocols run in the network. This mechanism ensures the best possible in-band connectivity between the controller and all network nodes, capitalizing on an interface which is already supported by network devices. Whisper’s internal algorithms further reduce the number of messages sent by the controller, to make the exerted control as lightweight as possible for the devices. Beyond detailing Whisper’s design, we discuss compelling use cases that Whisper unlocks, including rerouting around low-battery devices and providing runtime defense to jamming attacks. We also describe how to implement Whisper in current IoT open standards (RPL and 6TiSCH) without modifying IoT devices’ firmware. This shows that Whisper can implement an SDN-like control for distributed low power networks with no specific support for SDN, from legacy to next generation IoT devices. Our testbed experiments show that Whisper successfully controls the network in both the scheduling and routing plane, with significantly less overhead than other SDN-IoT solutions, no additional latency and no packet loss.