Towards enhanced connectivity through WLAN slicing

dcorujo — Tue, 17 Oct 2017 16:31:06 +0000

Nowadays domestic and enterprise WLANs are pervasive and offer capabilities adequate for a broad spectrum of applications. Unlocking these networks for enhanced wireless access to select users and devices, through dynamically sharing the unused portion of hotspots bandwidth, is key to provide seamless connectivity. Far from providing just basic wireless connectivity, we argue that these WLANs can be efficiently exploited to cope with emerging applications in the context of smart cities, massive machine type communication, and cellular data offloading. We introduce an approach aimed at the efficient sharing of available WLANs resources, allowing applications of domestic or enterprise users to coexist with third-party applications. To achieve this goal, we go beyond existing solutions by proposing the virtualization of access networks to offer differentiated networking services in an isolated manner. However, commodity wireless access devices are low-cost and performance-constrained, in contrast to carrier-grade systems that are very costly by deploying high networking performance. For this paper, we focus on the suitability of our approach on the customer premises, by assessing key performance networking aspects of SDN-enabled commodity wireless access devices, to obtain a better perspective of their current limitations.

Towards Fog-Based Slice-Defined WLAN Infrastructures to Cope with Future 5G Use Cases

dcorujo — Tue, 17 Oct 2017 11:24:38 +0000

The advent of future 5th Generation (5G) use cases, such as ultra-dense networking and ultra-low latency propelled by Smart Cities and IoT projects will demand revolution- ary network infrastructures. The need for low latency, high bandwidth, scalability, ubiquitous access and support for IoT resource-constrained devices are some of the prominent issues that networks have to face to support future 5G use cases, which arise since current wireless and mobile infrastructures are not able to fulfill. In particular, the pervasiveness and high-density of Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN) at urban centers, together with their growing capacity and evolving standards, can be leveraged to support such demand. We argue that the integration of key 5G cornerstone technologies, such as Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and softwarization, fill some of the abovementioned gaps in regards to proper WLAN management and service orchestration. In this paper, we present a solution for slicing WLAN infrastructures, aiming to provide differentiated services on top of the same substrate through customized, isolated and independent digital building blocks. Through this proposal, we aim at efficiently handling ultra-dense networking 5G use cases to achieve benefits at unprecedented levels. Towards this goal, we present proof of concept realised over a real testbed and assess its feasibility.

(Archived) - wlan

Towards enhanced connectivity through WLAN slicing

Towards Fog-Based Slice-Defined WLAN Infrastructures to Cope with Future 5G Use Cases