A software-defined wireless networking enabled spectrum management architecture

Recent years have seen the proliferation in versatile mobile devices and application services that demand different data rates and latencies. Fixed channelization configuration in today's wireless devices fail to be efficient in the presence of such dynamic demands. In this regard, fine-grained spectrum management designs have been advocated by the research community to embrace the heterogeneity in devices and services. However, manufacturers hesitate to make hardware investments without comprehensive understanding of these designs. To break this stalemate, software-defined wireless networking (SDWN) has been pushed to market as a cost-effective paradigm. Motivated by recent innovations in SDWN, this article systematically investigates the spectrum management architecture design that reaps the benefits of SDWN while maintaining the features of fine-grained channelization. We shed light on design principles and key challenges in realizing the SDWN-enabled spectrum management architecture. With these principles and challenges in mind, we develop a general architecture with a new baseband virtualization design. We build a prototype that seamlessly integrates with the IEEE 802.11 protocol stack and commodity RF front-end. We demonstrate that the proposed architecture improves spectrum efficiency by emulating the upper layer behaviors using the traces captured in a campus WLAN.