SDN-based Slice Orchestration and MAC Management for QoS delivery in IEEE 802.11 Networks

The ever-increasing deployment of new wireless technologies and the demand for mobile services delivery has hampered the efficient and reliable wireless communication. While traditional IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) suffer interference from other wireless technologies, their manageability is currently limited. In this context, the overall performance in terms of bitrate, latency, and reliability depends on a number and often dynamically changing aspects where the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer plays a crucial role. Current IEEE 802.11 MAC protocols cannot be programmed fine-grained enough and they cannot manage multiple networks at runtime. In this paper, we propose an approach and an algorithm for on-the-fly End-to-End (E2E) Quality of Service (QoS) slice orchestration and IEEE 802.11 MAC management based on Software-Defined Networking (SDN) principles. We argue that, by performing slice orchestration and IEEE 802.11 MAC management at runtime, it is possible to deliver improved and reliable E2E QoS. To demonstrate the feasibility of our approach, we developed a prototype where our hands-on experiments show that we can reduce the average latency in half while compromising only less than 8% of the average throughput.