Wireless Mesh Software Defined Networks (wmSDN)

In this paper we propose to integrate Software Defined Networking (SDN) principles in Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) formed by OpenFlow switches. The use of a centralized network controller and the ability to setup arbitrary paths for data flows make SDN a handy tool to deploy fine-grained traffic engineering algorithms in WMNs. However, centralized control may be harmful in multi-hop radio networks formed by commodity devices (e.g. Wireless Community Networks), in which node isolation and network fragmentation are not rare events. To exploit the pros and mitigate the cons, our framework uses the traditional OpenFlow centralized controller to engineer the routing of data traffic, while it uses a distributed controller based on OLSR to route: i) OpenFlow control traffic, ii) data traffic, in case of central controller failure. We implemented and tested our Wireless Mesh Software Defined Network (wmSDN) showing its applicability to a traffic engineering use-case, in which the controller logic balances outgoing traffic among the Internet gateways of the mesh. Albeit simple, this use case allows showing a possible usage of SDN that improves user performance with respect to the case of a traditional mesh with IP forwarding and OLSR routing. The wmSDN software toolkit is formed by Open vSwitch, POX controller, OLSR daemon and our own Bash and Python scripts. The tests have been carried out in an emulation environment based on Linux Containers, NS3 and CORE tools.

I. Introduction

A Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is a multi-hop radio network, whose nodes are IP routers with one or multiple wireless interfaces, typically based on IEEE 802.11 WiFi. WiFi interfaces are usually configured in ad-hoc mode and use omnidirectional antennas. However, the increasing availability of wireless routers with multiple interfaces allows configuring the interfaces in the more reliable infrastructure mode, in which some hub routers are configured as Access Point (AP) and collect traffic from spoke routers that are configured as STAtion (STA). A hub router is interconnected to other parts of the network through another WiFi interface, which may also operate in the same frequency, in case of directional antennas.