Seamless Handoff and Performance Anomaly Reduction Schemes Based on OpenFlow Access Points

Abstract

The enterprise WLANs that are composed of multiple access points (APs) and AP controller, provide wireless backbone networks in the building and campus. In this paper, we propose the Open Flow AP system that is a software-defined enterprise WLAN system based on the Open Flow-based AP and the Open Flow controller. Also, we propose the seamless handoff and performance anomaly reduction schemes based on the Open Flow AP system in order to improve total throughput of the networks while user experience is guaranteed. We deployed the Open Flow AP system in the lab building and performed several experiments to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed system and applications. When the proposed system is compared with the existing WLANs, it performs handoff seamlessly without reassociation and increases total throughput of the network by 26.7% when client is located in overlapped service area.