Mobility Management in AP Using SDN-NFV Technologies

Traditional WLAN typically relied on signal strength for handoff that is not sufficient for fair selection of physical access point (_PAP) and also causes the poor performance of network and load imbalance. To deal with these issues, we proposed a mobility management scheme on the basis of logical AP (_LAP) that keeps a connection with the mobile terminal (MT) during handoff either triggered by the user or software-defined network (SDN) controller for seamless mobility. The proposed scheme was implemented on a real testbed in WLAN environment, and the evaluation results demonstrated that it could provide a rather good seamless handover without throughput degradation and load imbalancing between _PAPs, with an efficient handoff procedure to allocate the best AP in the neighbor region.