A measurement study of a single-BSS software defined WiFi testbed

The emerging software defined networking (SDN) provides a new paradigm of network management by separating control functionalities from underlying data forwarding hardware to an external controller. SDN provides high flexibility to control the whole network in a unified way. In this paper, we are motivated to study the performance issues of a software defined WiFi network testbed. This testbed consists of a single basic service set (BSS) managed by an SDN controller. We conducted a measurement study of this testbed under different scenarios in the lab environments. This evaluation study focused on the throughput performance between different devices. The testbed was evaluated under different traffic loads in terms of nodes and packet sizes for both TCP and UDP traffic flows. For the comparison purpose, the performance of the conventional WiFi network is set as the benchmark. Our results demonstrate the trade-off between performance and flexibility of software defined access points.