A novel multipath-transmission supported software defined wireless network architecture

The inflexible management and operation of today\u27s wireless access networks cannot meet the increasingly growing specific requirements, such as high mobility and throughput, service differentiation, and high-level programmability. In this paper, we put forward a novel multipath-transmission supported software-defined wireless network architecture (MP-SDWN), with the aim of achieving seamless handover, throughput enhancement, and flow-level wireless transmission control as well as programmable interfaces. In particular, this research addresses the following issues: 1) for high mobility and throughput, multi-connection virtual access point is proposed to enable multiple transmission paths simultaneously over a set of access points for users and 2) wireless flow transmission rules and programmable interfaces are implemented into mac80211 subsystem to enable service differentiation and flow-level wireless transmission control. Moreover, the efficiency and flexibility of MP-SDWN are demonstrated in the performance evaluations conducted on a 802.11 based-testbed, and the experimental results show that compared to regular WiFi, our proposed MP-SDWN architecture achieves seamless handover and multifold throughput improvement, and supports flow-level wireless transmission control for different applications

Mobileflow: Applying SDN to Mobility in Wireless Networks

Wireless technology has become an increasingly popular way for network access. Wireless networks provide efficient, reliable service; supporting a broad range of emerging applications including multimedia streaming and video conferencing. Currently, there are two dominant technologies for providing wireless network access: cellular broadband networks and wireless local area networks (Wi-Fi). Cellular networks offer ubiquitous coverage, high reliability, and support mobility; yet such networks require expensive specialized equipment and expensive spectrum bands. In contrast, Wi-Fi networks utilize unlicensed frequency bands; relying on commodity equipment. As a result, Wi-Fi infrastructure operational costs are lower than cellular network costs. Wi-Fi networks however, have limited coverage, do not support mobility, and are less reliable than cellular networks. Recently, software-defined-networking architectures are gaining interest. The Software-Defined Networking (SDN) approach separates control (forwarding decisions) and data plane (packet processing). This approach provides an abstraction of a network switch and an interface for manipulating this abstraction with clear semantics. The SDN approach enables applications to control underlying network services without knowing the low-level details of specific network equipment. Thus, this approach allows network programming by modifying the behavior of the routers and switches to meet network application requirements. This thesis introduces a reference architecture that supports user mobility through integration of the SDN technology into Wi-Fi networks. This project then implements a mobility manager application on top of an SDN controller to handle clients’ handoff between access points. It proposes an algorithm for mobility prediction, allowing the network operator to minimize packet loss and delays during handoffs. Algorithm validation uses real data traces from the Texas A&M University network. Trace analysis was conducted to extract mobility patterns to build a prediction model which was implemented as an application in the SDN controller. The approach was tested by measuring packet loss that was decreased by approximately nine times. Collected mobility traces were used to analyze our prediction model performance, whose accuracy reached 65% and 95% when selecting five users with Last-in-First-out scheme with a high- and low-load access point, respectively. This research lays out groundwork for enhancing the functionality of WiFi networks, including mobility support, while maintaining their advantages in terms of lower cost, flexibility, and user of off-the-shelf components

How far can we go? Towards Realistic Software-Defined Wireless Networking Experiments

International audienceSoftware-Defined Wireless Networking (SDWN) is an emerging approach based on decoupling radio control functions from the radio data plane through programmatic interfaces. Despite diverse ongoing efforts to realize the vision of SDWN, many questions remain open from multiple perspectives such as means to rapid prototype and experiment candidate software solutions applicable to real world deployments. To this end, emulation of SDWN has the potential to boost research and development efforts by re-using existing protocol and application stacks while mimicking the behavior of real wireless networks. In this article, we provide an in-depth discussion on that matter focusing on the Mininet-WiFi emulator design to fill a gap in the experimental platform space. We showcase the applicability of our emulator in an SDN wireless context by illustrating the support of a number of use cases aiming to address the question on how far we can go in realistic SDWN experiments, including comparisons to the results obtained in a wireless testbed. Finally, we discuss the ability to replay packet-level and radio signal traces captured in the real testbed towards a virtual yet realistic emulation environment in support of SDWN research

Resource slicing in virtual wireless networks: a survey

New architectural and design approaches for radio access networks have appeared with the introduction of network virtualization in the wireless domain. One of these approaches splits the wireless network infrastructure into isolated virtual slices under their own management, requirements, and characteristics. Despite the advances in wireless virtualization, there are still many open issues regarding the resource allocation and isolation of wireless slices. Because of the dynamics and shared nature of the wireless medium, guaranteeing that the traffic on one slice will not affect the traffic on the others has proven to be difficult. In this paper, we focus on the detailed definition of the problem, discussing its challenges. We also provide a review of existing works that deal with the problem, analyzing how new trends such as software defined networking and network function virtualization can assist in the slicing. We will finally describe some research challenges on this topic.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Load-Aware Traffic Control in Software-Defined Enterprise Wireless Local Area Networks

With the growing popularity of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), modern enterprise Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) deployments always consist of multiple Access Points (APs) to meet the fast-increasing demand for wireless access. In order to avoid network congestion which leads to issues such as suboptimal Quality of Service (QoS) and degraded user Quality of Experience (QoE), intelligent network traffic control is needed. Software Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging architecture and intensively discussed as one of the most promising technologies to simplify network management and service development. In the SDN architecture, network management is directly programmable because it is decoupled from forwarding layer. Leveraging SDN to the existing enterprise WLANs framework, network services can be flexibly implemented to support intelligent network traffic control. This thesis studies the architecture of software-defined enterprise WLANs and how to improve network traffic control from a client-side and an AP-side perspective. By extending an existing software-defined enterprise WLANs framework, two adaptive algorithms are proposed to provide client-based mobility management and load balancing. Custom protocol messages and AP load metric are introduced to enable the proposed adaptive algorithms. Moreover, a software-defined enterprise WLAN system is designed and implemented on a testbed. A load-aware automatic channel switching algorithm and a QoS-aware bandwidth control algorithm are proposed to achieve AP-based network traffic control. Experimental results from the testbed show that the designed system and algorithms significantly improve the performance of traffic control in enterprise WLANs in terms of network throughput, packet loss rate, transmission delay and jitter