A Review on Design and Implementation of Software-Defined WLANs

Wireless local area networks (WLANs) being the most common access technology, the use of software-defined networks (SDN) in WLANs is inevitable as SDN paradigm has been widely accepted and implemented in the networking industry. Currently, the main focus of SDN is on wired networks. OpenFlow, the most widely accepted protocol for SDN, does not fully support wireless medium, and thus, software-defined WLANs (SDWLANs) have not gained enough attention from the research community. We believe that SDN cannot only solve the long-existing issues for WLANs, but also enable researchers to bring more advanced techniques for higher data rates, better security, and quality of experience. In this article, we have emphasized the importance of integrating SDN into WLANs, and the benefits WLANs can gain by adopting SDN. More specifically, we have explained the advantages as well as the implementation details of SDN for WLANs along with the most prominent recent research efforts and contributions.