Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has received, in the last years, significant interest from the academic and the industrial communities alike. The decoupled control and data planes found in an SDN allows for logically centralized intelligence in the control plane and generalized network hardware in the data plane. Although the current SDN ecosystem provides a rich support for wired packet-switched networks, the same cannot be said for wireless networks where specific radio data-plane abstractions, controllers, and programming primitives are still yet to be established. In this work we present a set of programming abstractions modeling the fundamental aspects of a wireless network, namely state management, resource provisioning, network monitoring, and network reconfiguration. The proposed abstractions hide away the implementation details of the underlying wireless technology providing programmers with expressive tools to control the state of the network. We also present a Software-Defined Radio Access Network Controller for Enterprise WLANs and a Python-based Software Development Kit implementing the proposed abstractions. Finally, we experimentally evaluate the usefulness, efficiency and flexibility of the platform over a real 802.11-based WLAN. extensive industrial and academic research experience in the mobile wireless communication area, end-to-end network architectures and services. He has several granted patents and has published more than 60 articles in major journals and conferences. He is a member of the IEEE and ACM.

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) sits firmly on the networking evolutionary path. By migrating network functions from dedicated devices to general purpose computing platforms, NFV can help reducing the cost to deploy and operate large IT infrastructures. In particular NFV is expected to play a pivotal role in mobile networks where significant cost reductions can obtained by dynamically deploying and scaling Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) in the core and access segments. However, in order to achieve its full potential, NFV needs to extend its reach also the radio access network segment. Here Mobile Virtual Network Operators shall be allowed to request radio access VNFs with custom resource allocation solutions. Such requirement raises several challenges in terms of performance isolation and resource provisioning. In this work, we formalize the wireless VNF placement problem as an integer linear programming problem and we propose a VNF Placement heuristic named WiNE (Wireless Network Embedding) to solve the problem. Moreover, we also present a proof-of-concept implementation of an NFV management and orchestration framework for enterprise WLANs. The proposed architecture builds upon a programmable network fabric where pure forwarding nodes are mixed with radio and packet processing capable nodes.

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