Software defined wireless mesh networks: from theory to practice

Abstract

Wireless mesh network (WMN) integrating with Software De ned Network (SDN) has been considered as a remarkable technology in the communication eld since it has the potential to provide Internet broadband access with economical infrastructure. In par- ticular, this thesis demonstrates an experimental deployment of Software De ned Wireless Mesh Network(SD-WMN) equipped with multi radio(MR), multi channel(MC) { SoftMesh testbed. There are three major challenges that need be addressed in current multi-radio wire- less mesh networks. Due to the limited number of channels in IEEE 802.11 a,b,g,n, there will be tremendous interference in the network. Therefore, using multiple-channels with an e ective channel assignment algorithm is imperative to decrease network interference. Second, when using multi links wtih di erent bandwidth for data transmission, assigning appropriate weight for each link is required to minimize the total transmission delay. Lastly, traditional Multi-path load-balancing in wired network cannot be directly implemented in WMN. Therefore, a proper load-balancing and widest path routing scheme is introduced to improve the overall network capacity. A performance experimental is presented to assess the e ectiveness of our proposed algorithm. SoftMesh { wireless mesh network testbed is deployed in the Jabara Hall building at the Wichita State University.