LegoFi the WiFi Building Blocks! The Case for a Modular WiFi Architecture

LegoFi the WiFi Building Blocks! The Case for a Modular WiFi Architecture

Abstract

The increasing demand for flexibility in WiFi network deployments along with more stringent requirements on performance and security stand in stark contrast to today’s ossified and expensive WiFi architecture. In particular, today’s WiFi networks consists of a large number of control and data plane network functions that are either bundled into a single access controller running on proprietary hardware or are distributed across the network to run on WiFi access points. This approach does not properly reflect the broad and evolving diversity of scenarios in which WiFi is deployed. This paper makes the case for a functional decomposition of the WiFi: we want to support the allocation and composition of individual (virtualized and programmable) WiFi function blocks, where and when they are most useful. This allocation may also be adjusted dynamically, e.g., during a failover or a scale-out. We present our vision and a rough functional decomposition, describe our proposed LegoFi architecture, and explore how LegoFi can benefitial in four di↵erent deployment scenarios.

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Authors
  • Schulz-Zander, Julius
  • Schmid, Stefan
  • Kempf, James
  • Riggio, Roberto
  • Feldmann, Anja
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Supplemental Material
Shortfacts
Category
Paper in Conference Proceedings or in Workshop Proceedings (Paper)
Event Title
ACM MOBICOM Workshop on Mobility in the Evolving Internet Architecture (MobiArch)
Divisions
Communication Technologies
Subjects
Informatik Allgemeines
Event Location
New York City, New York, USA
Event Type
Workshop
Event Dates
October 2016
Date
2016
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