Wireless SDN for Highly Utilized MANETs
Klement Streit, Nils Miro Rodday, Florian Steuber, Corinna Schmitt, Gabi Dreo Rodosek · 2019
Nearly all scenarios in the networking domain require reliable radio communication. However, for some use-cases such as military operations or disaster recovery in the realm of catastrophic events it is even more crucial for successful completion. In practice, MANETs are commonly used for these scenarios as they expose features that suit military as well as civil requirements very well, e.g. strict QoS limitations and specific data type support. Since new applications require not only the transmission of static content, but instead the continuous transfer of large audio and video streams, a network structured according to the MANET architecture might easily be over-utilized. This usually results in higher delays and increased loss rate. However, aforementioned scenarios are a common use-case in which MANETs should still deliver on QoS guarantees to avoid DoS conditions. In this paper, we propose a solution for a MANET that is highly utilized by adding a SDN controller responsible for traffic scheduling, although the traffic itself continues to be routed through the MANET. Our approach monitors the MANET's bandwidth utilization and determines routes according to this knowledge. In addition, the controller decreases the bandwidth of flows if the MANET cannot provide the requested resources. We show, that the use of CSMA/CA for the scheduling algorithm within the controller lacks certain properties and elaborate on solving this issue.