Ethanol: A Software-Defined Wireless Networking architecture for IEEE 802.11 networks

Abstract

Wireless Networks have become ubiquitous to support the growing demand from mobile users, and other devices, like in the Internet of Things (IoT). This article proposes a Software-Defined Wireless Networking architecture specialized in 802.11 Wireless LANs, called Ethanol, which provides a more fine-grained control. Ethanol is the first wireless SDN architecture that extends the control to the user devices. Further, Ethanol allows intelligent white-box control with finer grain than the state of the art, since it is optimized for WiFi. The proposed architecture is evaluated on a prototype over three use cases. Ethanol can be deployed in any Access Point (AP) running embedded Linux, since it has a negligible overhead — up to 1% in memory and 0.1% in CPU usage. Our results show that Ethanol dynamically alter the throughput of an application up to 3x during a prioritization period, returning bandwidth to other applications outside this period. Only by controlling the best time to perform the handover, our results show about 45% improvement over the traditional signal-based handover process.