Context-Aware Software-Defined Wireless Networks: An AI-based Approach to Deal with QoS

Many IoT systems require real-time communication, which imposes strict timing constraints on data transmission and stresses network propagation models. These systems need to address these communication requirements using wireless networks, and also manage quality of service. While Software-Defined Wireless Networks (SDWNs) offer a compelling alternative for these scenarios, they lack dynamic mechanisms to autonomously adapt network behavior to fluctuating operational conditions. Context-Aware Software-Defined Wireless Networks (CA-SDWNs) proposes a self-adapting traffic management strategy to deal with dynamic real-time requirements. Particularly, it adapts the medium access protocol parameters to changes in the operational context using an intelligent agent in the control loop of the network. We implemented the CA-SDWN model using the NS-3 simulator, and that implementation was made available for researchers and developers through an open source library. The model was evaluated using several SDWNs that operate under dynamic conditions. The experimental results show how incorporating artificial intelligence into the control loop enables the use of the context information to enhance the predictability of the medium access protocol parameters, handling thus different traffic QoS according to the demand of IoT applications.
In the data you can find the evaluation results for different network sizes (number of nodes) and type of traffic (high, medium, low and non real-time) obtained with four different methods: i) Best effort IEEE 802.11 (no QoS handling), ii) Orig. SDWN (IEEE 802.11e standard configuration), iii) Modif. SDWN (IEEE 802.11e modified parameters configuration based on heuristic approach), and iv) IA SDWN (IEEE 802.11e configuration modified dinamically with an intelligent agent).
For more details on the four methods and simulation scenarios and experiments see the paper: Context-Aware Software-Defined Wireless Networks: An AI-based Approach to Deal with QoS to be published in Future Internet.