A Comparative Study of Channel Switching Latency for Conventional and SDN-based Routing in Multi-Hop Multi-Radio Wireless Mesh Networks

Nowadays, Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have received worldwide acceptance as an attractive paradigm on top of the existing and upcoming wireless technologies. Up to now, a lot of research studies have been conducted on the channel assignment in multi-radio WMNs. To address the destructive impact of interference as an inevitable element of WMNs, it is necessary to reconfigure the wireless radios for switching to the less-congested channels, frequently. Although this problem has been investigated through extensive modeling and simulations, the consequences of channel switching for popular WMN routing schemes have not been assessed sufficiently. In this paper, we present a concise analysis of channel switching latency in multi-hop multi-radio scenarios for OLSR, BATMAN-adv and Open80211s protocols through experimentation testbed. Moreover, we evaluate the functionality of SDN-based WMNs in terms of channel switching delay. The acquired results substantiate that although by using SDN it is feasible to improve the network responsiveness, still the channel switching latency is not negligible.