Programmatic Orchestration of WiFi Networks

With wireless technologies becoming prevalent at the last hop, today’s network operators need to manage WiFi access networks in unison with their wired counterparts. However, the non-uniformity of feature sets in existing solutions and the lack of programmability makes this a challenging task. This paper proposes Odin, an SDN-based solution to bridge this gap. With Odin, we make the following contributions: (i) Light Virtual Access Points (LVAPs), a novel programming abstraction for addressing the IEEE 802.11 protocol stack complexity, (ii) a design and implementation for a software-defined WiFi network architecture based on LVAPs, and (iii) a prototype implementation on top of commodity access point hardware without modifications to the IEEE 802.11 client, making it practical for today’s deployments. To highlight the effectiveness of the approach we demonstrate six WiFi network services on top of Odin including load-balancing, mobility management, jammer detection, automatic channel-selection, energy management, and guest policy enforcement. To further foster the development of our framework, the Odin prototype is made publicly available.