An SDN-Based Connectivity Control System for Wi-Fi Devices

In recent years, the prevalence of Wi-Fi-enabled devices such as smartphones, smart appliances, and various sensors has increased. As most IoT devices lack a display or a keypad owing to their tiny size, it is difficult to set connectivity information such as service set identifier (SSID) and password without any help from external devices such as smartphones. Moreover, it is much more complex to apply advanced connectivity options such as SSID hiding, MAC ID filtering, and Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) to these devices. Thus, we need a new Wi-Fi network management system which not only facilitates client access operations but also provides a high-level authentication procedure. In this paper, we introduce a remote connectivity control system for Wi-Fi devices based on software-defined networking (SDN) in a wireless environment. The main contributions of the proposed system are twofold: (i) it enables network owner/administrator to manage and approve connection request from Wi-Fi devices through remote services, which is essential for easy connection management across diverse IoT devices; (ii) it also allows fine-grained access control at the device level through remote control. We describe the architecture of SDN-based remote connectivity control of Wi-Fi devices. While verifying the feasibility and performance of the proposed system, we discuss how the proposed system can benefit both service providers and users.