SWN: An SDN based framework for carrier grade Wi-Fi networks

With the rapid growth of mobile data traffic and vast traffic offloaded from cellular network, Wi-Fi has been considered as an essential component to cope with the tremendous growth of mobile data traffic. Although operators have deployed a lot of carrier grade Wi-Fi networks, but there are still a multitude of arrears for nowadays Wi-Fi networks, such as supporting seamless handover between APs, automatic network access and unified authentication, etc. In this paper, we propose an SDN based carrier grade Wi-Fi network framework, namely SWN. The key conceptual contribution of SWN is a principled refactoring of Wi-Fi networks into control and data planes. The control plane has a centralized global view of the whole network, can perceive the underlying network state by network situation awareness (NAS) technique, and bundles the perceived information and network management operations into northbound Application Programming Interface (API) for upper applications. In the data plane, we construct software access point (SAP) to abstract the connection between user equipment (UE) and access point (AP). Network operators can design network applications by utilizing these APIs and the SAP abstraction to configure and manage the whole network, which makes carrier grade Wi-Fi networks more flexible, user-friendly, and scalable.