Radio Access Network Virtualization for the Social Internet of Things

In the social Internet of Things (SIoT), devices are often divided into groups with different relationships in social networks. The radio access network (RAN), which is often used to connect IoT devices to the IoT cloud service, doesn´t adequately support SIoT groups. Thus, to distinguish SIoT groups in a RAN, network virtualization with a software-defined network (SDN) structure is preferable because of its scalability and usability. However, it´s hard to support many groups because of the rule space limitation of existing SDN-enabled devices. The authors introduce an SDN-based RAN virtualization framework, and state the problem of maximizing the number of SIoT groups with limited SDN rule space. They also propose an efficient algorithm to solve this problem. Through simulation, the authors show that their solution supports more SIoT groups than the original SDN-based RAN virtualization.