WASP: A software-defined communication layer for hybrid wireless networks

In this paper we introduce WASP, a general communication layer for hybrid wireless networks where multiple networks are used to complement each other. In our system, we capitalize on an infrastructure with a ubiquitous, wide-area network to help enable the creation of a local mobile ad-hoc network in an efficient, scalable, evolvable, and manageable way. In particular, in an architecture inspired by software-defined networking, we decouple the control plane and data plane in the mobile devices and shift the control plane to a centralized controller. The controller, reachable via the wide-area network, manages a collection of mobile devices by informing each device how to handle traffic based on neighbor information provided by the mobile devices. With this, a mobile ad-hoc network can help reduce the data burden on the ubiquitous network, and the ubiquitous network can help reduce the burden on the mobile devices. WASP can be used in different networks with different applications such as cellular and military networks. In this paper, we based our implementation on Android and tested on a collection of Google Nexus-4 devices to measure metrics such as battery consumption. We evaluate on an extended ns-3 simulation platform which we added the ability to run unmodified Android applications on the nodes within ns-3. Our experiments show that WASP scales better than traditional ad-hoc networks with only a minimal trade off of energy. Additionally, we show that a content distribution scheme using WASP on smart phones with cellular data plans significantly offloads bandwidth from the cellular infrastructure, and in turn reduces expensive data usage and energy usage.