Implementation of relay based on software-defined and virtualized campus WLANs

Abstract

The combination of emerging technologies, such as software defined network (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV), provides a potential for the development for the current network. SDN decouples the control plane from the data plane and supports network programmability which can share network and radio resources. NFV is proposed to address the problems of network ossification and can implement network functions through pure software. In this paper, inspired by SDN and NFV, we propose a novel concept of virtual resource pipe called OpenPipe for software-defined and virtualized campus WLANs (SD-WLANs). Benefited from OpenPipe and extended OpenFlow (exOpenFlow) protocol, a relay selection method is proposed to enable relay to cover the whole area of interest and improve system network performance. In SD-WLANs, our proposed relay selection method can be easily invoked only by coding at the application layer. Experiment results demonstrate that our scheme is able to increase the total throughput, the flexibility and availability of network.