Load aware automatic channel switching for software-defined enterprise WLANs

Abstract

In the last decade, the 2.4 GHz band of IEEE 802.11 WLANs has become heavily congested due to the explosive increase in demand of Wi-Fi connectivity. With the current deployment of enterprise WLANs, channel switching mechanism continues to exhibit inefficiencies because it cannot adapt to real-time channel condition and the inability to support seamless channel switching. Software Defined Networking (SDN) as an emerging architecture is promising to introduce flexibility and programmability for wireless network management. Leveraging SDN to existing enterprise WLANs, channel switching method can be improved significantly. This paper presents a software-defined enterprise WLAN framework with a load aware automatic channel switching solution, which utilizes AP load and channel interference factor (CIF) to provide seamless channel switching. Two automatic channel switching algorithms named Single Switch (SS) and Double Switch (DS) are proposed to improve the overall user experience and the experience of users with highest traffic load respectively. Experiment results demonstrate that our solution can efficiently improve user experience in terms of jitter, transmission delay and network throughout when compared to the conventional channel switching mechanism.