SWIFT: Bringing SDN-Based Flow Management to Commodity Wi-Fi Access Points

Wi-Fi networks are largely served using over-the-counter commodity Wi-Fi routers, access points (APs), and possibly with wireless controllers. Existing approaches to bring the benefits of Software-defined Networking (SDN) to such WiFi networks suffer from availability, hardware requirements, and scalability issues. For instance, these approaches do not support enterprise APs whose firmware cannot be modified. Furthermore, we observe that using SDN controllers for managing all the flows traversing these APs and routers requires more than just installing an SDN switch on these devices. In this paper, we present our solution called SWIFT: Software-defined Wi-Fi Flow Management, for bringing SDN-based flow management to WiFi networks using commodity Wi-Fi APs, Wi-Fi routers, and Wi-Fi controllers. We also detail its benefits, shortcomings, and possible use cases. Specifically, our solution significantly lowers the barrier-to-entry for deploying and conducting research on software-defined Wi-Fi networks.