Towards IoT Slicing for Centralized WLANs in Enterprise Networks

Emergence of Internet of Things (IoT) and its affiliated services brought new challenges, such as diversity of service requirements, massive connectivity, security and isolating concerns, and integration issues in networks and business. Network slicing is a powerful tool to address these challenges leveraging technologies such as Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV). In this article, we propose an architecture to address diverse requirements and resource provisioning challenges of IoT in WiFi networks. The difference between this work and the prior work is on the combination of IoT slicing with WiFi. We utilize the WiFi slicing paradigm to leverage SDN capabilities, such as service classification based on user demands and elastic resource allocation, to map different services into IoT slices. We translate Quality of Service (QoS) requirements into different IoT slices and formulate system requirements as an optimization problem with the objective of maximizing the total throughput of the WiFi system while meeting the IoT slices' constraints. Based on the numerical results, our proposed architecture not only guarantees all slicing service demands but also improves the total throughput of a WiFi network by 8%.