A Linux-PC implementation design for elastic WLAN system

For ubiquitous network services, wireless local-area network (WLAN) systems using plural access-points (APs) are often deployed in a network field. Then, a host may detect signals from multiple APs that are interfered. This redundancy can cause performance degradations and energy wastes if a small number of hosts participates the network. On the other hand, if many hosts participate there, the number of APs should be increased so that the sufficient communication quality is provided for each host. Thus, the WLAN system is expected to be adaptive and elastic to changes of host loads. In this paper, we present an idea of the elastic WLAN system and its implementation design using Linux-PCs. The key technology for this system is the use of the AP aggregation algorithm that has been proposed to minimize the number of active APs in the field by aggregating APs using the virtual AP technology. By using Linux tools and commands, this system collects necessary information for the algorithm input, and controls the APs based on the algorithm output. The implementation and evaluation of our proposal will be in future works.