Creation, Management and Migration of Virtual Access Points in Software Defined WLAN

The demand of mobile wireless communication increases year by year. To satisfy the demand, multiple radio techniques (RATs) are suggested to be integrated in the next generation wireless communication system, i.e. 5G. Wi-Fi is one candidate RAT but the anarchy of access points of Wi-Fi degrades the network performance. Software-defined wireless local area network (WLAN) built atop virtual access points is proposed to increase the flexibility of network planning and address the poor performance of conventional WLAN. However, there is still a gap between the concept of software-defined WLAN and its implementation. In this paper, we intend to eliminate the gap and dig deeper into the implementation. A series of procedures for creation, management and migration of virtual access points is proposed. Since these procedures are for access points and follow the standard of IEEE 802.11, no modification of user equipment is required. Through case study, we show that the proposal outperforms conventional WLAN.