OSWireless: Enhancing Automation for Optimizing Intent-Driven Software-Defined Wireless Networks

To control wireless networks with optimized configurations, engineers usually need to grapple simultaneously with network modeling, algorithm and protocol design as well as their implementation on distributed nodes. This process is tedious and error prone. In this article we attempt to address this challenge by designing OSWireless, a new control plane for optimizing software-defined wireless networks. At the core of OSWireless is the virtualization of four control plane functionalities, including intent, mathematical, algorithmic and forwarding specifications, and then provide them as a service to network engineers. To this end, we design two new subplanes for the control plane: Wireless Network Abstraction Specification (WiNAS) Subplane and Optimization-as-a-Service (OaaS) Subplane. The former converts intent specifications defined using high-level APIs to the corresponding mathematical specifications, and the latter generates automatically operational (possibly distributed) algorithmic specifications. We prototype OSWireless and deploy it over NeXT, a newly developed software-defined experimentation testbed, and showcase the flexibility of OSWireless in automated generation of control programs and the effectiveness of the generated programs considering a variety of network control problems. OSWireless can help enhance the automation of wireless network development, deployment and optimization.