NLES: A novel lifetime extension scheme for safety-critical cyber-physical systems using SDN and NFV

The cyber-physical system (CPS) is a promising technique that enables a safety-critical industry ecosystem. In general, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and the Internet of Things are the sensing and communication infrastructures for CPS. Currently, software-defined networking (SDN) have been used as the new networking architecture for typical WSNs and CPS. However, there are two unresolved problems for a software-defined CPS. First, a feasible systemic architecture is a must for software-defined CPS, which should provide a global virtualization management and closed-loop control between the cyber side and the physical side in a CPS. Second, the lifetime of a software-defined CPS scenario needs to be extended for critical applications. To address the above challenges, this paper proposes a systematic virtual networking architecture to perform the global virtualization control and monitoring of a CPS, in which network functions virtualization (NFV) configuration and orchestration can be realized. Moreover, based on the proposed architecture, a novel lifetime extension scheme (NLES), is proposed for a software-defined CPS. To orchestrate the resource dynamically and efficiently, the instant programmability of an SDN and instant deployment capability of NFV are utilized to control the topology of node modes of a CPS. Then, a game theoretic topology decision approach is proposed to control the topology of the clustering and virtual network function deployment of sensors at run-time in a CPS. The experimental results show that NLES has longer lifetime compared to those of the traditional schemes.