The growth of Internet of Things (IoT) devices with multiple radio interfaces has resulted in a number of urban-scale deployments of IoT multinetworks, where heterogeneous wireless communication solutions coexist (e.g., WiFi, Bluetooth, Cellular). Managing the multinetworks for seamless IoT access and handover, especially in mobile environments, is a key challenge. Software-defined networking (SDN) is emerging as a promising paradigm for quick and easy configuration of network devices, but its application in urban-scale multinetworks requiring heterogeneous and frequent IoT access is not well studied. In this paper we present UbiFlow, the first software-defined IoT system for combined ubiquitous flow control and mobility management in urban heterogeneous networks. UbiFlow adopts multiple controllers to divide urban-scale SDN into different geographic partitions (assigning one controller per partition) and achieve distributed control of IoT flows. A distributed hashing based overlay structure is proposed to maintain network scalability and consistency. Based on this UbiFlow overlay structure, the relevant issues pertaining to mobility management such as scalable control, fault tolerance, and load balancing have been carefully examined and studied. The UbiFlow controller differentiates flow scheduling based on per-device requirements and whole-partition capabilities. Therefore, it can present a network status view and optimized selection of access points in multinetworks to satisfy IoT flow requests, while guaranteeing network performance for each partition. Simulation and realistic testbed experiments confirm that UbiFlow can successfully achieve scalable mobility management and robust flow scheduling in IoT multinetworks; e.g., 67.21 percent throughput improvement, 72.99 percent reduced delay, and 69.59 percent jitter improvements, compared with alternative SDN systems.

The growing of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has resulted in a number of urban-scale deployments of IoT multinetworks, where heterogeneous wireless communication solutions coexist. Managing the multinetworks for mobile IoT access is a key challenge. Software-defined networking (SDN) is emerging as a promising paradigm for quick configuration of network devices, but its application in multinetworks with frequent IoT access is not well studied. In this paper we present UbiFlow, the first software-defined IoT system for ubiquitous flow control and mobility management in multinetworks. UbiFlow adopts distributed controllers to divide urban-scale SDN into different geographic partitions. A distributed hashing based overlay structure is proposed to maintain network scalability and consistency. Based on this UbiFlow overlay structure, relevant issues pertaining to mobility management such as scalable control, fault tolerance, and load balancing have been carefully examined and studied. The UbiFlow controller differentiates flow scheduling based on the per-device requirement and whole-partition capability. Therefore, it can present a network status view and optimized selection of access points in multinetworks to satisfy IoT flow requests, while guaranteeing network performance in each partition. Simulation and realistic testbed experiments confirm that UbiFlow can successfully achieve scalable mobility management and robust flow scheduling in IoT multinetworks.

Many missions are deemed dangerous or impractical to perform by humans, but can use collaborating, self-managing unmanned autonomous vehicles (UAVs) which adapt their behaviour to current context, recover from component failure or optimise performance. This paper describes a policy-based distributed self-management framework for both individual and teams of UAVs. We use three levels of specifications - policy, mission class and mission instance to enable reuse of both policies and mission classes. The architecture has been tested on devices ranging from small laptops to body area networks. Initial evaluation shows the distributed architecture is scalable and outperforms a centralised mission management scheme.