Abstract
IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN is proliferating since the increased trend in the wireless network utilization on mobile devices. Accuracy, fast content delivery, and reliable mobility support are essential features of any network to support the changing trend in a wireless network. However, traditional architectures in wireless LAN (WLANs or WiFi) always endured from challenges such as the provision of consistent mobility, real-time packet flow, and seamless handoff. Generally, most of the WLAN only relies on signal strength for handoff which is not sufficient enough for fair selection of an access point (AP) and therefore causes imperfect performance of the network. We present a novel mobility management scheme for WLANs to deal with the mobility management issues, and load balancing by software-defined network (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) technologies. The proposed scheme is based on logical AP (LAP) that keeps a connection with the user/mobile terminal (MT) during handoff triggered by either the user or the SDN controller for seamless mobility. It also involves the current state of each AP in addition to traditional parameters of WLAN. We implemented the proposed scheme on a real testbed in a WLAN environment. The evaluation results authenticate that our proposed scheme provides robust handover without throughput degradation and load imbalance among adjacent APs, and allocates the best AP in the neighboring region. Moreover, our proposed scheme is feasible to implement since it did not require any modification at the mobile terminal.
Highlights
The rapid growth in mobile Internet applications and innovation of mobility services, location-based services, WiFi calling and cloud services, and the IEEE 802.11-based wireless LANs (WLANs/WiFi) has gained a lot of attention in recent years, because the WLAN provides economical solution to support the Internet access services with high throughput in contrast to cellular networks
5 Conclusions The emergence of the software-defined network (SDN)/network function virtualization (NFV) paradigm provides us with a new chain of innovative prospects for solving the mobility issues in the traditional WLAN
To address the problems of seamless handover and mobile terminal (MT) association with overloaded access point (AP) in the signal-overlapping area, in this paper, we proposed an integrated mobility management scheme which considers both seamless handover and load balancing
Summary
The rapid growth in mobile Internet applications and innovation of mobility services, location-based services, WiFi calling and cloud services, and the IEEE 802.11-based wireless LANs (WLANs/WiFi) has gained a lot of attention in recent years, because the WLAN provides economical solution to support the Internet access services with high throughput in contrast to cellular networks. The SDN-based handover approach [8] proposes for IEEE 802.11WLAN in which the handover procedure depends on neighbor AP response and permits the MT to connect with several APs simultaneously It enables fast switching among APs to improve the performance of the video streaming applications. The migration of LAP among adjacent PAPs can be performed without a re-association process and skipped the additional MAC layer procedures that provide an illusion of the consistent connection at the user side. It detects the load of PAP using the OpenWRT mwan package [9] which includes the outbound traffic load information that we further elaborated in Eq 1.
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