OpenWiMesh: A Framework for Software Defined Wireless Mesh Networks

The adoption of Software-Defined Networks (SDN) in the context of wireless mesh networks opens up room for new functionalities such as traffic engineering, flow based traffic forwarding and, more generally, "programmability". If on one hand the new paradigm brings many perspectives, for another some challenges need to be addressed, such as the contrast between the SDN\´s centralized model and mesh networks\´ inherently distributed architecture, or additionally, the demand for a separate control channel apart from the data channel. This work introduces OpenWiMesh, a framework which integrates SDN, more precisely Open Flow, in wireless mesh networks, using in-band signaling and allows to experiment different traffic engineering techniques to improve network utilization. Sample applications implemented and evaluated with emulation shows the framework\´s feasibility and potential.