Towards enhanced connectivity through WLAN slicing

Nowadays domestic and enterprise WLANs are pervasive and offer capabilities adequate for a broad spectrum of applications. Unlocking these networks for enhanced wireless access to select users and devices, through dynamically sharing the unused portion of hotspots bandwidth, is key to provide seamless connectivity. Far from providing just basic wireless connectivity, we argue that these WLANs can be efficiently exploited to cope with emerging applications in the context of smart cities, massive machine type communication, and cellular data offloading. We introduce an approach aimed at the efficient sharing of available WLANs resources, allowing applications of domestic or enterprise users to coexist with third-party applications. To achieve this goal, we go beyond existing solutions by proposing the virtualization of access networks to offer differentiated networking services in an isolated manner. However, commodity wireless access devices are low-cost and performance-constrained, in contrast to carrier-grade systems that are very costly by deploying high networking performance. For this paper, we focus on the suitability of our approach on the customer premises, by assessing key performance networking aspects of SDN-enabled commodity wireless access devices, to obtain a better perspective of their current limitations.