Avaya has completed an experiment that it says proves software-defined networking (SDN) can work at the scale required for the Internet of Things (IoT).

The company reported earlier this week that it used its SDN architecture, Fx, to successfully network 168,000 devices. Avaya did this work with Inocybe, a Canadian company that provides a commercial distribution of the OpenDaylight Project's framework.

Results like this are going to be increasingly important for carriers and vendors, because SDN wasn't originally crafted with IoT-like scale in mind.

The practical side of the demo is that Fx has a version tailored to the healthcare industry. There, the architecture is likely to run into IoT issues relatively quickly, due to the number of connected devices being used.

For the IoT test, run in Avaya's Billerica, Massachusetts labs, the company used an IoT gateway, which it calls the Open Network Adapter (ONA). Treating these ONAs as virtual switches, Avaya networked them in an OpenDaylight-based framework, using one SDN controller per 660 ONAs.

Avaya's IoT architecture also includes load balancers from KEMP Technologies, allowing edge devices to consider the entire network as one entity.

For security — another major issue when it comes to selling to the healthcare industry — Fx applies a type of micro-segmentation by creating service paths based on who is connecting into the network (with IoT devices included as possible "whos") and what's being accessed.