Fine-Grained Traffic Engineering on SDN-Aware Wi-Fi Mesh Networks

Software-defined networking (SDN) has introduced noticeable progresses in the design and development of computer networks. In fact, SDN empowers us to run more advanced algorithms for resource management through the separation of control and data planes using a centralized approach. By applying SDN to different communication platforms, e.g., Wi-Fi mesh networks (WMNs), we gain an unprecedented opportunity to design more efficient and cost-effective solutions. In WMNs, the process of service provisioning incorporates tightly correlated steps, including access point association, gateway selection, and backhaul routing. In most of the prior studies, these steps were investigated as independent NP-hard problems. To the best of our knowledge, there is no thorough formulation that considers all the necessary steps at different tiers of WMNs to construct a unified and fine-grained solution. In this paper, we present a structured scheme to address the demands of end-users over SDN-aware WMNs. In contrast to most of the former works, our proposed formulation takes the key characteristics of wireless networks into account, especially for multichannel multiradio WMNs. In addition, for applying our solution to the large-scale scenarios, we introduce a heuristic algorithm that can find a suboptimal solution in polynomial time. The functionality of the presented work is evaluated through extensive numerical results and real testbed implementation.