Fine-grained access provisioning via joint gateway selection and flow routing on SDN-aware Wi-Fi mesh networks

In recent years, dramatic growth of mobile data traffic has left the operators no choice but to consider Wi-Fi networks as an economic complementary solution. To achieve this, WLANs require to adopt some of the key features of carrier-grade operators, such as centralized resource management. As an emerging paradigm, Software Defined Networking (SDN) can be used to provide salient centralized network solutions for Wi-Fi infrastructures. In fact, applying SDN to different wireless platforms, e.g., Wi-Fi Mesh Networks (WMNs), brings unprecedented opportunities to improve the network performance by employing more sophisticated algorithms at SDN controllers. Moreover, it should be noted that traffic engineering over WMNs incorporates tightly correlated steps including association control, gateway selection and flow routing which are individually NP-hard problems. In this paper, we present an agile and fine-grained access provisioning solution via bridging the cellular and Wi-Fi technologies that empowers us to address the users demand by steering data flows on different tiers of WMNs. In contrast to the prior work, we present a detailed unified formulation for joint gateway selection and flow routing in Multi-Channel Multi-Radio (MC-MR) WMNs that considers the key attributes of wireless networks. The functionality of the presented solution is evaluated through various experiments with extensive numerical results.