An Open Management and Administration Platform for IEEE 802.11 Networks

The deployment of Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) has greatly increased in past years. Due to the large deployment of the WLAN, the immediate need of management platforms has been recognized, which has a significant impact on the performance of a WLAN. Although there are various vendor-specific and proprietary solutions available in the market to cope with the management of wireless LAN, they have problems in interoperability and compatibility. To address this issues, IETF has come up with the interoperability standard of management of WLANs devices, Control And Provisioning of Wireless Access Points (CAPWAP) protocol, which is still in the draft phase. Commercial implementation of this draft protocol from WLAN equipment vendors is rather expensive. Open source community, therefore, tried to provide free management solutions. An open source project called openCAPWAP was initiated. However, it lacks a graphic user interface that makes it hard to implement for novice network administrators or regular customers. Therefore, the researcher designed and developed a web interface framework that encapsulates openCAPWAP at the bottom to provide user-friendly management experience. This application platform was designed to work with any remote web server in the public domain through which it can connect to access points or access controllers through a secure shell to configure them. This open platform is purely open source-based. It is operating system independent: it can be implemented on any open source environment such as regular Linux operating system or embedded operation system small form factor single board computers. The platform was designed and tested in a laboratory environment and a remote system. This development contributes to network administration in both network planning and operational management of the WLAN networks

Multimedia delivery in the future internet

The term “Networked Media” implies that all kinds of media including text, image, 3D graphics, audio and video are produced, distributed, shared, managed and consumed on-line through various networks, like the Internet, Fiber, WiFi, WiMAX, GPRS, 3G and so on, in a convergent manner [1]. This white paper is the contribution of the Media Delivery Platform (MDP) cluster and aims to cover the Networked challenges of the Networked Media in the transition to the Future of the Internet. Internet has evolved and changed the way we work and live. End users of the Internet have been confronted with a bewildering range of media, services and applications and of technological innovations concerning media formats, wireless networks, terminal types and capabilities. And there is little evidence that the pace of this innovation is slowing. Today, over one billion of users access the Internet on regular basis, more than 100 million users have downloaded at least one (multi)media file and over 47 millions of them do so regularly, searching in more than 160 Exabytes1 of content. In the near future these numbers are expected to exponentially rise. It is expected that the Internet content will be increased by at least a factor of 6, rising to more than 990 Exabytes before 2012, fuelled mainly by the users themselves. Moreover, it is envisaged that in a near- to mid-term future, the Internet will provide the means to share and distribute (new) multimedia content and services with superior quality and striking flexibility, in a trusted and personalized way, improving citizens’ quality of life, working conditions, edutainment and safety. In this evolving environment, new transport protocols, new multimedia encoding schemes, cross-layer inthe network adaptation, machine-to-machine communication (including RFIDs), rich 3D content as well as community networks and the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays are expected to generate new models of interaction and cooperation, and be able to support enhanced perceived quality-of-experience (PQoE) and innovative applications “on the move”, like virtual collaboration environments, personalised services/ media, virtual sport groups, on-line gaming, edutainment. In this context, the interaction with content combined with interactive/multimedia search capabilities across distributed repositories, opportunistic P2P networks and the dynamic adaptation to the characteristics of diverse mobile terminals are expected to contribute towards such a vision. Based on work that has taken place in a number of EC co-funded projects, in Framework Program 6 (FP6) and Framework Program 7 (FP7), a group of experts and technology visionaries have voluntarily contributed in this white paper aiming to describe the status, the state-of-the art, the challenges and the way ahead in the area of Content Aware media delivery platforms

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

An architecture for software defined wireless networking

Software defined networking, characterized by a clear separation of the control and data planes, is being adopted as a novel paradigm for wired networking. With SDN, network operators can run their infrastructure more efficiently, supporting faster deployment of new services while enabling key features such as virtualization. In this article, we adopt an SDN-like approach applied to wireless mobile networks that will not only benefit from the same features as in the wired case, but will also leverage on the distinct features of mobile deployments to push improvements even further. We illustrate with a number of representative use cases the benefits of the adoption of the proposed architecture, which is detailed in terms of modules, interfaces, and high-level signaling. We also review the ongoing standardization efforts, and discuss the potential advantages and weaknesses, and the need for a coordinated approach.The research leading to these results has been partly funded by the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007–2013 under grant agreement no. 317941-project iJOIN, http://www.ict-ijoin.eu/Publicad

Frequency management in a campus-wide Wi-Fi deployment

Over the past years, Internet is spreading more and more. And not only in home devices, but also in other personal devices thus producing a collective mobile lifestyle. At the beginning of its rise, cable solution was the most applied technology. However, in a world becoming a “mobile world”, wired networks can’t fulfil all new challenges. Thus, Wireless networks are increasingly encroaching on the niche of traditional access technologies. In fact, mobile broadband is exponentially being integrated into every aspect of life; and that seems to be only the beginning of what is to come, as the several millions of people using the latest trend gadgets ratify. One of the key technologies that enable mobile Internet access is IEEE 802.11, commonly known by its trademark, Wi-Fi, which assures interoperability and backward compatibility between products. Part of the popularity achieved by Wi-Fi is due to the use of unlicensed (i.e. free) spectrum. Traditionally, only three of the fourteen frequency channels established in the 2.4GHz are used. This is so in order to avoid interference, as these channels (1, 6 and 11) belong to non-overlapping frequencies. However, the recent explosive growth in the number of wireless devices together with the multitude of wireless protocols operating in the unlicensed radio spectrum bands and sharing the same spectrum, lead to a saturation of the limited available spectrum, thus causing the frequency channels assigned to be repeated in close cells. Definitely, it results in interference and performance degradation, and broadly, a non-optimal performance of the network. Within this context, in which the number of users is very large but the radio resources are scarce, efficient channel allocation becomes crucial for the successful deployment and operation of IEEE802.11-based WLANs. And this is indeed the main purpose of this Master Thesis, in which a system able to establish communication with a controller and set a new channel distribution according to a renowned mathematical algorithm is exposed. The presented system has been tested in CBL – UPC Barcelona Tech campus, giving satisfactory outcomes and conclusions as a result. But before going deep into the process details, this work also reviews WLAN 802.11 standards and radio resource management techniques used nowadays, so the reader will easily understand the context which encompasses this work and how the system presented is able to improve an already settled technology.Castellà: Desde hace unos años, Internet se está extendiendo cada vez más. Y no sólo en los hogares, sino también en aparatos de uso personal que están convirtiendo nuestro estilo de vida en un estilo “móvil”. Al principio de su aparición, la tecnología cableada era la más recurrida. Sin embargo, en este mundo cada vez más móvil, nos encontramos con que las redes cableadas no pueden satisfacer los nuevos retos. Es por esto que las redes inalámbricas están invadiendo el espacio de las tecnologías de acceso tradicionales. De hecho, la banda ancha móvil se está acoplando a un ritmo vertiginoso en muchos aspectos de nuestra vida; y esto parece ser sólo el comienzo, como demuestran los varios millones de personas que utilizan los aparatos tecnológicos más modernos. Una de las tecnologías clave que permiten acceso móvil a Internet es IEEE 802.11, más conocida como Wi-Fi, término comercial que asegura interoperabilidad y compatibilidad entre productos. Parte de su popularidad se debe al uso del rango de frecuencias libres de licencia. Tradicionalmente, sólo tres de los catorce canales que establece la banda de 2,4GHz son asignados. Esto ha sido siempre así para evitar interferencias, ya que estos canales (1, 6 y 11) pertenecen a frecuencias que no se solapan. Sin embargo, la reciente explosión en el número de dispositivos inalámbricos así como la cantidad de protocolos que trabajan en el mismo rango frecuencial, provocan una saturación de este espectro limitado, haciendo así que se asignen los mismos canales en celdas cercanas. Sin duda, esto se traduce en interferencias, y en general, hace que el comportamiento de la red no sea el óptimo. En este contexto, en el que el número de usuarios es elevado pero los recursos radio escasos, la asignación eficiente de canales se vuelve crucial para tener buen despliegue y funcionamiento de las redes WLAN basadas en IEEE802.11. Y éste es de hecho el propósito principal de esta Master Thesis, que presenta un sistema capaz de establecer comunicación con una controladora y decidir una nueva distribución de canales según un conocido algoritmo matemático. El sistema que se presenta ha sido probado en el campus CBL–UPC Barcelona Tech, obteniendo resultados y conclusiones satisfactorios. Pero antes de entrar en los detalles del proceso, este trabajo también analiza los estándares IEEE 802.11 así como las técnicas actuales utilizadas en la gestión de recursos, de manera que el lector entenderá fácilmente el contexto en el que este trabajo se realiza y cómo el sistema presentado es capaz de mejorar una tecnología ya asentada

Beacon-Based Service Publishing Framework in Multiservice Wi-Fi Hotspots

In an expected future multiaccess and multiservice IEEE 802.11 environment, the problem of providing users with useful service-related information to support a correct rapid network selection is expected to become a very important issue. A feasible short-term 802.11-tailored working solution, compliant with existing equipment, is to publish service information encoded within the SSID information element within beacon frames. This makes it possible for an operator to implement service publishing in 802.11 networks while waiting for a standardized mechanism. Also, this straightforward approach has allowed us to evaluate experimentally the performance of a beacon-based service publishing solution. In fact, the main focus of the paper is indeed to present a quantitative comparison of service discovery times between the legacy scenario, where the user is forced to associate and authenticate with a network point of access to check its service offer, and the enhanced scenario where the set of service-related information is broadcasted within beacons. These discovery times are obtained by processing the results of a measurement campaign performed in a multiaccess/service 802.11 environment. This analysis confirms the effectiveness of the beacon-based approach. We also show that the cost in terms of wireless bandwidth consumption of such solution is low

Future Trends and Challenges for Mobile and Convergent Networks

Some traffic characteristics like real-time, location-based, and community-inspired, as well as the exponential increase on the data traffic in mobile networks, are challenging the academia and standardization communities to manage these networks in completely novel and intelligent ways, otherwise, current network infrastructures can not offer a connection service with an acceptable quality for both emergent traffic demand and application requisites. In this way, a very relevant research problem that needs to be addressed is how a heterogeneous wireless access infrastructure should be controlled to offer a network access with a proper level of quality for diverse flows ending at multi-mode devices in mobile scenarios. The current chapter reviews recent research and standardization work developed under the most used wireless access technologies and mobile access proposals. It comprehensively outlines the impact on the deployment of those technologies in future networking environments, not only on the network performance but also in how the most important requirements of several relevant players, such as, content providers, network operators, and users/terminals can be addressed. Finally, the chapter concludes referring the most notable aspects in how the environment of future networks are expected to evolve like technology convergence, service convergence, terminal convergence, market convergence, environmental awareness, energy-efficiency, self-organized and intelligent infrastructure, as well as the most important functional requisites to be addressed through that infrastructure such as flow mobility, data offloading, load balancing and vertical multihoming.Comment: In book 4G & Beyond: The Convergence of Networks, Devices and Services, Nova Science Publishers, 201