SDNMesh: An SDN Based Routing Architecture for Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

Software Defined Networking (SDN) has been seen as a revolutionary and exciting network technology that aims to enable control and network management of various network types, whether wired or wireless. Nevertheless, SDN research focuses very little on wireless communication and, more specifically, on Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs). Moreover, the issue of routing is vitally important in WMNs, but the legacy and traditional routing protocols cannot make the most of multiple paths between the source node and destination node due to the complexity and cost of the network. In this paper, we present SDNMesh, an SDN based routing architecture for WMNs. We combine SDN with WMN to allow mesh networks to meet current user requirements with several resources, coverage, and scalable high bandwidth capability. Apart from the mentioned capability, SDN's unified approach leads to better network capacity management. Experiments have been carried out using the Mininet-WiFi simulation tool to create a network environment that allows integration of the two networking paradigms, centralized, and decentralized. Simulation results show that our SDNMesh routing solution performs better in terms of network performance metric throughput, packet loss ratio, and delay while comparing with traditional routing approaches such as OLSR, BATMAN, and an SDN based Three-Stage routing protocols. Moreover, experimental results show that SDNMesh gives better results in terms of the mentioned performance metrics.

Keywords

• Control plane
• data plane
• programmable
• routing
• software defined networking
• wireless mesh networks