Towards programmable enterprise WLANS with Odin

  • Authors:

  • Lalith Suresh;Julius Schulz-Zander;Ruben Merz;Anja Feldmann;Teresa Vazao

  • Affiliations:

  • Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisbon, Portugal;Telekom Innovation Laboratories & Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany;Telekom Innovation Laboratories & Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany;Telekom Innovation Laboratories & Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany;INESC-ID & Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisbon, Portugal

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the first workshop on Hot topics in software defined networks
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

We present Odin, an SDN framework to introduce programmability in enterprise wireless local area networks (WLANs). Enterprise WLANs need to support a wide range of services and functionalities. This includes authentication, authorization and accounting, policy, mobility and interference management, and load balancing. WLANs also exhibit unique challenges. In particular, access point (AP) association decisions are not made by the infrastructure, but by clients. In addition, the association state machine combined with the broadcast nature of the wireless medium requires keeping track of a large amount of state changes. To this end, Odin builds on a light virtual AP abstraction that greatly simplifies client management. Odin does not require any client side modifications and its design supports WPA2 Enterprise. With Odin, a network operator can implement enterprise WLAN services as network applications. A prototype implementation demonstrates Odin's feasibility.