Mobility Management in AP Using SDN-NFV Technologies

Traditional WLAN typically relied on signal strength for handoff that is not sufficient for fair selection of physical access point (PAP) and also causes the poor performance of network and load imbalance. To deal with these issues, we proposed a mobility management scheme on the basis of logical AP (LAP) that keeps a connection with the mobile terminal (MT) during handoff either triggered by the user or software-defined network (SDN) controller for seamless mobility. The proposed scheme was implemented on a real testbed in WLAN environment, and the evaluation results demonstrated that it could provide a rather good seamless handover without throughput degradation and load imbalancing between (P)APs, with an efficient handoff procedure to allocate the best AP in the neighbor region.