A NAT Based Seamless Handover for Software Defined Enterprise WLANs

Abstract

Various applications used by mobile users today need seamless connectivity for providing a good quality user experience. Enterprise Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) is one of the technologies used by mobile devices to connect to the Internet in several environments. For providing seamless connectivity and communication, mobility management becomes an important aspect of such deployments. In this paper, we propose a client-unaware handover process for NAT (Network Address Translation) operation mode of the access points in a Software Defined Networking (SDN) based enterprise WLAN framework. The proposed mechanism has been implemented in simulation and the results show that the proposed mobility management mechanism is able to achieve seamless handover and provide uninterrupted connectivity and communication to the mobile devices.

Testbed evaluation of a seamless handover mechanism for an SDN-based enterprise WLAN

“…This section explains the implementation of the prototype of the SDN-based enterprise WLAN framework [6], along with the NAT-based handover process [5]. The source code of the testbed implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/arkadeepsen/Handover.…”

“…Mobility management in enterprise WLANs is of two types: mobile device driven or distributed [1,2] and network driven or centralized [3,4]. In [5] and [6], details are provided about other related works on mobility management in enterprise WLANs. We do not present additional details about these works here.…”

“…In this letter, we present the testbed implementation details of a centralized, NAT-based, client-unaware, seamless handover mechanism, proposed in [5], which provides uninterrupted connectivity during handovers. The design of the centralized enterprise WLAN framework is enabled by Software-Defined Networking (SDN) principles.…”

“…This design provides a global view of the entire WLAN at the logically central SDN Controller. The NATbased handover mechanism [5] has been proposed using the SDN-based enterprise WLAN framework proposed in [6]. The handover mechanism periodically checks if any mobile device is moving away from its connected AP and, if so, then it initiates handover for all those roaming mobile devices.…”