SoSA: Socializing Static APs for Edge Resource Pooling in Large-Scale WiFi System

Large-scale WiFi system is gaining an increasing momentum rapidly in most corporate places. Enabling edge functions on the system is imperative to support unprecedented edge applications. However, building edge functionalities at each AP may incur frequent service migrations, low resource utilization, and inflexible resource provisioning. It is thus prospective to federate suitable APs to create a resource-pooled edge system such that users in association with federated APs can share the pooled resource. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture, named SoSA, to Socialize Static APs via user association transition activities for edge resource pooling. A reference implementation of SoSA is developed under an operating large-scale WiFi system in a campus area of 3.0925 km
²
. The novelty and contribution of SoSA lie in its three-layer design. In transition data feeding layer, we collect and process 25,074,733 association records of 55,809 users from 7,404 APs in a real WiFi system. In sociality construction and characterization layer, we construct an AP contact graph based on user transition statistics, under which we empirically study the sociality of APs and explore their evolving patterns. In edge resource pooling layer, by harnessing the AP sociality, we are able to customize resource pooling strategy to improve service provisioning performance. With adopting SoSA, we systematically investigate the performance of AP federation strategy in reducing service migration when users frequently transit among APs. Extensive data-driven experiments corroborate the efficacy of SoSA.