SDN-Based Traffic Management Middleware for Spontaneous WMNs

Software Defined Networking (SDN), with its clear distinction of control and data planes, as well with its simple paradigm of logically centralized controller with global visibility of the whole targeted network status, is gaining momentum in different scenarios. However, its effective exploitation in Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) is still an open and emerging research topic, mainly due to the high dynamicity of some related deployment environments (e.g., spontaneous WMNs) and to the need of efficient solutions capable of locality-enhanced optimizations. Here we originally present motivations, challenges, design guidelines, and a prototype middleware implementation for SDN-based management of selected (most appropriate) traffic flows. Our solution advances the state of the art in the field by (i) allowing high flexibility via deployment and de/activation of flow management policies at provisioning time, (ii) supporting dynamicity via proper efficient handling node of join/leave events, and (iii) increasing scalability via a partially decentralized approach based on dynamically determined WMN “islands”, usually managed by separated SDN controllers that can seldom interact to federate their management decisions. In addition to design/implementation insights and to the availability of the prototype code, this paper provides the community with a significant novel contribution in terms of experimental performance results, which quantitatively demonstrate the feasibility and the effectiveness of the proposed approach.