OpenCAPWAP v2.0: the new open-source implementation of the CAPWAP protocol

Summary We present the latest version of OpenCAPWAP, our open-source implementation of the Internet Engineering Task Force control and provisioning of wireless access point (CAPWAP) protocol. The CAPWAP protocol is designed to support centralized management of large-scale and heterogeneous wireless networks, with a special focus on IEEE 802.11-based networks. The implementation presented in this paper improves substantially on the previous version, adding full support for the Split MAC architecture and decoupling completely the implementation from a specific driver solution. Although the main goal of the paper is to describe the technical solutions we adopted in the new implementation rather than present a complete performance analysis, we report, besides a wide set of experimental tests that validates the new implementation of OpenCAPWAP in terms of its functionalities and stability, also performance figures that show how OpenCAPWAP does not introduce any significant overhead with respect to commercial proprietary solutions. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.