An SDN Agent-Enabled Rate Adaptation Framework for WLAN

Abstract

Rate or link adaptation is the determination of the optimal modulation and coding scheme (MCS) that will maximize the performance under the current wireless channel conditions. A Software-Defined Networking (SDN) agent is a software element bridging an SDN controller and any legacy wireless network elements by providing the abstraction of these elements. In this paper, we present the work of an SDN approach for designing and implementing a Rate/Link Adaptation (RA) framework for wireless local area networks (WLAN). The framework provides support for real-time RA applications and flexibility to satisfy various degrees of Quality of Service (QoS) or Quality of Experience (QoE) requirements. We implement the proposed framework as an extension to the Wireless Open-Access Research Platform (WARP), an FPGA based Software-Defined Radio (SDR) platform, with evaluation results indicating the feasibility of using SDN-RA under the stringent time constraints posed by the WLAN. To demonstrate the effectiveness of decoupling rate decision functions from the underlying wireless interface card and to highlight its applicability for a diverse set of scenarios, we present a use case deployed over the framework focusing on rate adaptation for individual traffic, and display optimization in different aspects, such as the reduction transmission errors.

Joint Radio Resource Management and Link Adaptation for Multicasting 802.11ax-Based WLAN Systems

“…The LA designs for 802.11ax-based WLANs have been also considered in literature; however, the number of related works is very limited. In particular, [16] has utilized a software define network (SDN) approach to propose a link adaptation framework for next-generation WLANs which can dynamically support numerous devices with various degrees of Quality of Service (QoS) or Quality of Experience (QoE) requirements. In this work, an SDN agent was incorporated with application program interfaces to separate the control and data plane based on which an on-line RRM mechanism was developed by providing the abstraction of wireless elements to the SDN controller.…”

“…,i be the effective SNR of user x (UU v or user k in MG v) which is obtained based on the temporary precoder solution of the problem (12) or (16). Denote p v ,i as the power allocation for UU/MG v (v ∈ GU) over RU( , i).…”

Adaptive ML-Based Frame Length Optimisation in Enterprise SD-WLANs

“…This trend has given rise to ambitious SDN-based approaches for Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) as a way not only to simplify network management but also to alleviate the complexity of algorithms aiming to optimize different aspects of the network [11][12][13]. As a result, a huge body of literature can be found on improvements on top of the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer, including the Modulation and Coding Scheme (MCS) [14,15] and resource-based slicing [16,17], among others. However, such improvements are limited by channel access and encapsulation [18], which makes frame size adaptation the focus of research, in an effort to reduce this transmission overhead.…”