Energy‐Aware and Optimization‐Driven Communication Protocol in Software‐Defined Networking for Heterogeneous Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an advanced technology that has seen significant growth over the past years. Because of the energy limitations of IoT devices, implementing effective managing practices to develop IoT applications remains a complicated task. One of the most critical IoT challenges that needs to be considered is routing, because of its significant impact on the consumption of energy. Software‐defined networking (SDN) is a method that decouples the control plane from the data plane, which enables the network administrators to program effectively. This work focuses on an energy‐aware communication protocol in SDN for a heterogeneous IoT model based on the proposed fractional poor rich optimization (FPRO). Initially, SDN is simulated and the SDN controller helps to map devices to particular applications for performing the counting process. The SDN poses triple layers, like the request analysis layer, routing layer, and communication layer. In the request analysis layer, the user requests are taken by the network devices. In the routing layer, clustering and routing are performed. Here, clustering is done by Bayesian fuzzy clustering (BFC) and routing is performed with FPRO. Here, FPRO is formed by combining fractional calculus (FC) with poor and rich optimization (PRO). Fitness is developed by considering the attributes that involve distance, delay, energy, and link cost. At last, the communication layer is used for transmitting data among nodes using optimal paths. The proposed FPRO‐based SDN showed superior performance with the least delay of 0.166 s, higher energy of 0.935 J, and higher throughput of 0.935 Mbps for 200 nodes.