Software Defined Networking for Community Network Testbeds

Wireless Community Networks have received increasing attention the latest years. In an effort to set the cornerstone for an internet without central authorities and monopolies, network engineers throughout the world have started creating community networks. To enhance this effort, Community-lab, a wireless community networks testbed, was created which allows researchers to experiment with new protocols and applications in a realistic environment. Nevertheless, this testbed does not offer the ability to perform L2 experiments. To address this gap, we developed a platform that allows Community-Lab researchers to perform L2 experiments. Moreover, we decided to reach our goal using Software Defined Networking(SDN) techniques, due to the attention they received lately and their promise for a complete networking solution. Overall, we propose an architecture that allows researchers to perform L2 experiments in a generic community networks testbed. To prove the feasibility of our archtecture we implemented it for Community-Lab using the OpenFlow SDN protocol, enabling researchers to manage their L2 topology of their experiment.