Seamless Integration of Wireless Interface to SDN Switch

Software-defined networking (SDN) enables network automation and flexibility by offering programmability. However, SDN was originally designed for Ethernet, with its core being an SDN switch controlled by an SDN controller. Hence, integration of wireless interfaces to the SDN switch, which may bring appealing SDN features to wireless networks, is not straightforward. The root cause is the MAC address (of the Ethernet port) may be overwritten by the wireless interface’s one, leading to a MAC address mismatch problem for wireless communication. This paper presents a way to seamlessly integrate a wireless interface into an SDN switch by developing an Automatic ARP Header Modification Algorithm, which avoids the mismatch problem. We realize seamless integration with Open vSwitch (OVS), Pox controller, and a Wi-Fi card. Moreover, we show the usefulness of the integration in a wireless system with TCP and UDP communications. The results show that our algorithm successfully solves the mismatch problem under our wireless environment.