Software Defined Networking (SDN) drastically changes the meaning and process of designing, building, testing, and operating networks. The current support for wireless networking in SDN technologies has lagged behind its development and deployment for wired networks. The purpose of this work is to bring principled support for wireless access networks so that they can receive the same level of programmability as wireline interfaces. Specifically we aim to integrate wireless protocols into the general SDN framework by proposing a new set of abstractions in wireless devices and the interfaces to manipulate them. We validate our approach by implementing our design as an extension of an existing OpenFlow data plane and deploying it in an IEEE 802.11 access point. We demonstrate the viability of software-defined wireless access networks by developing and testing a wireless handoff application. The results of the experiment show that our framework is capable of providing new capabilities in an efficient manner.
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