Communication overhead of an OpenFlow wireless mesh network

OpenFlow is a new paradigm for running experimental protocols on production networks, and is becoming a standard reference for implementation of the software defined networking. OpenFlow can be deployed on wireless mesh network, a multi-hop relaying wireless network, for efficient network traffic management. Furthermore, various challenges such as load-balancing and control traffic management of wireless mesh networks can be effectively handled with the OpenFlow central controller. In this paper, we develop an OpenFlow wireless mesh network testbed to investigate various performance metrics (e.g., throughput, latency, CPU usage, and control traffic) for full mesh and partial mesh network topologies. Furthermore, we measure empirical controller capacity, a new metric we defined to evaluate the OpenFlow wireless mesh network controller performance. We also address various implementation challenges of real-world OpenFlow wireless mesh networks.