A Software-defined Delay-aware Traffic Load Control for WiFi-based Smart City Services

Abstract

Most Smart city initiatives embrace WiFi as the candidate technology for its ubiquitous coverage and cost-effectiveness. Nevertheless, the quality-of-service (QoS) requirements of different applications vary, hindering the applicability of some smart city services. This paper addresses the usage of software-defined networking ( SDN) to control the traffic load of WiFi access points constituting a city-wide coverage. The traffic load control aims to satisfy the packet delay requirements of smart city applications without the need of having special requirements on the WiFi nodes such as running a software agent, sending probe packets, or supporting specific roaming protocol. A traffic load control algorithm is developed and tested using hardware experiments performed in a practical setting that mimics the actual scenario. The performance results show that the developed algorithm is effective in maintaining low packet transfer delay.