New virtualised AP for independent wireless network composition

Abstract

Virtual access point (VAP) is one of the most useful wireless virtualisation technologies because of its concurrent operation to compose multiple wireless networks via generating service set identifier. A single physical wireless NIC could access multiple networks in a single channel and thus establish a variety of wireless access point without additional wireless network interface. However, as the number of VAP increases, available bandwidth is reduced due to the fact that the number of management frame is increased dramatically in a single channel. Since the management frames should be sent as a basic data rate, channel utilisation and overall network performance would be degraded. To address this problem, system virtualisation is employed to augment wireless NIC hardware. Augmented wireless NICs are exposed to the guest OS and thus can access different wireless channel physically. The results obtained mitigate the bandwidth utilisation of management frame composed to the legacy VAP scheme, increasing round-trip time latency slightly.