Future digital factories are becoming more and more softwarized. This introduces flexibility, but the industry also demands robustness and Quality of Service (QoS) support. While 5G envisions to enable real-time applications with strict performance requirements, IEEE 802.11 networks continue to be a viable option for indoor scenarios. However, IEEE 802.11 networks currently cannot be programmed fine-grained enough to fully support and ensure QoS. Besides, due to the unknown or coarse-grained monitoring information over the wireless links, detecting performance degradation is still challenging. In this paper, we propose a Software-Defined Radio Access Network (SD-RAN) interactive management approach assisted by In-band Network Telemetry (INT) in IEEE 802.11 networks. We design a system-level architecture that includes the network administrator in the management loop through monitoring, visualization, and configuration activities. To demonstrate the feasibility of our approach, we developed a prototype and evaluated its flexibility in a real-world testbed. We argue that, with the fine-grained network information from INT and the benefits of the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm, an SDN-tailored system can assist in troubleshooting and assess enhanced QoS delivery.
展开▼
