Virtual Link Embedding in Software-Defined Multi-radio Multi-channel Multi-hop Wireless Networks

Abstract

There is rising interest in applying SDN principles to wireless multi-hop networks, as this paves the way towards bringing the programmability and flexibility that is lacking in today's distributed wireless networks (ad-hoc, mesh or sensor networks) with the promising perspectives of better mitigating issues as scalability, mobility and interference management and supporting improved controlled QoS services. This paper investigates this latter aspect and proposes an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) based wireless resource allocation scheme for the provision of point-to-point and point-to-multipoint end-to-end virtual links with bandwidth requirements in software-defined multi-radio multi-channel wireless multi-hop networks. The proposed scheme considers the specificities of wireless communications: the broadcast nature of wireless links which can be leveraged for point-to-multipoint links resource allocations, and, the interference between surrounding wireless links. It also considers switching resource consumption of wireless nodes since, for the time being, the size of SDN forwarding tables remains quite limited. A Genetic Algorithm derived from the ILP formulation is also proposed to address the case of large wireless networks. Our simulation results show that both methods work effectively.