Outsourcing coordination and management of home wireless access points through an open API

In dense wireless deployments at homes, such as apartment buildings, neighboring home WLANs share the same unlicensed spectrum by deploying consumer-grade access points in their individual homes. In such environments, WiFi networks can suffer from intermittent performance issues such as wireless packet losses, interference from WiFi and non-WiFi sources due to the rapid growth and increasing diversity of devices that share the spectrum. In this paper, we propose a vendor-neutral cloud-based centralized framework called COAP to configure, coordinate and manage individual home APs using an open API implemented by these commodity APs. The framework, implemented using OpenFlow extensions, allows the APs to share various types of information with a centralized controller - interference and traffic phenomenon and various flow contexts, and in turn receive instructions - configuration parameters (e.g., channel) and transmission parameters (through coarse-grained schedules and throttling parameters). This paper describes the framework and associated techniques, applications to motivate its potential benefits, such as, upto 47% reduction in channel congestion and our experiences from having deployed it in actual home environments.