Software Defined Machine-to-Machine Communication for Smart Energy Management

The successful realization of smart energy management relies on ubiquitous and reliable information exchange among millions of sensors and actuators deployed in the field with little or no human intervention. This motivates us to propose a unified communication framework for smart energy management by exploring the integration of software-defined networking with machine-to-machine communication. In this article, first we provide a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art contributions from the perspective of software defined networking and machine-to-machine integration. Second, the overall design of the proposed software-defined machine-to-machine (SD-M2M) framework is presented, with an emphasis on its technical contributions to cost reduction, fine granularity resource allocation, and end-to-end quality of service guarantee. Then a case study is conducted for an electric vehicle energy management system to validate the proposed SD-M2M framework. Finally, we identify several open issues and present key research opportunities.