Cell Breathing Based Load Balance In Software Defined WLAN

Enterprise WLAN system supports a wide range of functionalities and services,such as,support for authentication,access,and accounting(AAA),interference management,mobility management,load balancing and providing quality of service guarantees.Load unbalancing is a key issue in today's enterprise WLANs because of insufficient knowledge of network devices and clients.Load unaware handoff is also an issue to make network load-imbalance.Software Defined Networking(SDN)is considered a new paradigm which has the ability to overcome traditional network's limitations.SDN decouples data plane and control plane and makes network easy to manage and configure.This thesis addresses the issue of load unbalancing in enterprise WLANs.We are introducing the concept of SDN along with a load balancing technique "Cell Breathing" in enterprise WLANs.Cell breathing is a technique in which access points expand or shrink their coverage area by increasing or decreasing their transmission power respectively.By changing the coverage area of access points,load can be changed dynamically.A SDN based WLAN architecture "Odin" provides a structure to minimize handoff delays.Also,it provides the information of number of clients connected with it.We have used this information in our architecture to design cell breathing technique above SDN controller as an application by taking the advantages of Odin and cell breathing technique in single framework.This is accomplished by using an emulator called "Mininet-WiFi" to make virtual SDN based WLAN test bed for evaluating this technique.First,a load-imbalance WLAN scenario is designed.Then,the proposed technique is applied to balance the load of this scenario.This yields an increased throughput that is at least twice than that of the traditional network.The experimental results show the benefits and feasibility of the proposed technique.