Mobility management in IEEE 802.11 WLAN using SDN/NFV technologies

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.