Programming Abstractions for Software–Defined Wireless Networks

Roberto Riggio, Mahesh Marina, Julius Schulz-Zander, Slawomir Kuklinski, Tinku Rasheed

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract / Description of output

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has received, in the last years, significant interest from the academic and the industrial communities alike. The decoupled control and data planes found in an SDN allows for logically centralized intelligence in the control plane and generalized network hardware in the data plane. Although the current SDN ecosystem provides a rich support for wired packet-switched networks, the same cannot be said for wireless networks where specific radio data-plane abstractions, controllers, and programming primitives are still yet to be established. In this work, we present a set of programming abstractions modeling the fundamental aspects of a wireless network, namely state management, resource provisioning, network monitoring, and network reconfiguration. The proposed abstractions hide away the implementation details of the underlying wireless technology providing programmers with expressive tools to control the state of the network. We also present a Software-Defined Radio Access Network Controller for Enterprise WLANs and a Python--based Software Development Kit implementing the proposed abstractions. Finally, we experimentally evaluate the usefulness, efficiency and flexibility of the platform over a real 802.11-based WLAN.
Original languageEnglish
Number of pages17
JournalIEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management
Volume12
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jun 2015

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Programming Abstractions for Software–Defined Wireless Networks'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this