Testbed Implementation for Routing WLAN Traffic in Software Defined Wireless Mesh Network

Software defined network (SDN) is a promising network technology that separates the control plane from data plane. The network function can be defined by using open application programming interface (Open API) in the SDN. Therefore, the network operator can embed the network function in the SDN controller by developing the application source code. Since the SDN brings benefit of network especially in management perspective, it is considered applying SDN to the wireless mesh network (WMN) which has to manage a lot of routers in the networks. In this paper, the implementation of software defined-wireless mesh network (SD-WMN) is introduced. We develops both the AP (Access Point) on the open source wireless router (OpenWRT) platform. We also develops the open virtual switch (OVS) on the Raspbian platform in order to provide the interface between SDN controller and AP. Using SDN controller, the WMN topology can be seem in the graphic user interface (GUI) of SDN. Finally, we measure the performance of AP in our WMN testbed environment.