Abstract-Today's enterprise WLAN is facing challenges as the rapid growth of user scale and traffic load. Users often experience slow or even intermittent connection in crowded area. This is mainly due to the interference among denselydeployed access points (APs). In this paper, we took advantages of the emerging idea of SDN and OpenFlow technology to mitigate interference in enterprise WLAN. Specifically, we proposed an OpenFlow-based framework for enterprise WLAN. In this framework, a central controller takes control over all the APs via OpenFlow interface. By installing appropriate rules on OpenFlowenabled APs, the controller can realize fine-grained scheduling of APs' downlink packets. Based on such framework, we proposed a scheduling algorithm to obtain high packet reception rate so that the efficiency of DCF can be improved. Simulation results demonstrate that our solution can significantly increase network throughput and reduce retransmission rate. Moreover, since our solution preserves conventional DCF in 802.11 standard, no modification is required to existing 802.11 clients, which makes our solution practical.
For example, in REF , an OpenFlow-based framework is applied to enterprise WLANs for realizing downlink packet scheduling among multiple APs, where OpenFlow [8]
Leveraging SDN and OpenFlow to Mitigate Interference in Enterprise WLAN
J. Networks
J. Networks
Computer Science