SDN for Dense WiFi Networks

A large part of the population lives in high-density areas. Only in the US, 27 million households (24%) are located in multi-apartment buildings sharing resources with neighboring home networks. It’s expected to see 25 listed APs in an urban area, and such high density can be a bad indicator for network performance. Despite advancements in WiFi rates over the years, users often experience poor performance, deviating from what protocols promise. High interference and congested channels is commonplace, while misconfiguration often leads to poor channel and power allocation. Even though a plethora of access points are available, users can access only theirs, occasionally leading to poor coverage which in turn degrades the channel for everyone. A number of factors contribute to this: lack of coordination between individual homes, no expertise from users, and poor manageability of WiFi itself.

In this paper, we present an SDN framework for designing a denseWiFi network which aims to provide users with a personalized, fast and reliable network service