Experimental Deployment of a Multi-channel Wireless Backbone Network Based on an Efficient Traffic Management Framework

Abstract

This paper presents an experimental deployment of a multi-channel wireless backbone network (WBN) with an Open Flow-based traffic management framework. In a WBN, a set of APs, each of which uses a single and different channel, is connected by Ethernet and thus constructs a VAP handling multiple channels. To flexibly control traffic flow transmitted over multiple channels, we also implement a traffic management framework with a simple channel utilization method based on the Open Flow control. We then deploy a 6-hop WBN in a real environment and provide the Internet access service to conference attendees. Since the control messages are inherently transmitted with the introduction of Open Flow, the way of isolating between control plane and data plane will become critical issue. To solve this issue, we employ an additional AP, which constructs a dedicated control network for Open Flow. The results show that the proposed WBN can attain the network capacity of about 25 Mbps in 6-hop, thereby providing significant throughput performance for various applications including video streaming.