SDN-Based Traffic Management Middleware for Spontaneous WMNs

Abstract

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.

Soft-Mesh: A Robust Routing Architecture for Hybrid SDN and Wireless Mesh Networks

“…In general, flow statistics are collected by regularly polling the nodes with a pre-defined time interval by sending FlowStatisticsRequest control message. The polling frequency must be high to obtain precise statistics, but it will increase the monitoring overhead of the network [62] and [63]. An adaptive flow statistics processing algorithm is proposed to maintain a balance between the precision in the processing of statistics and network overhead.…”

A Framework for Dynamic Configuration of TLS Connections Based on Standards

“…This is possible because SDN gives the responsibility of taking decisions to a centralized entity named SDN controller (control plane) while the traffic forwarding activity is performed by network nodes (data plane). This architecture provides a flexible and agile management of the network from the administrator's viewpoint, especially when the number of nodes is high and the network is frequently reconfigured [5].…”