SDN has been envisioned as the next generation network paradigm by decoupling control plane and data plane, such that network management and optimization can be conducted in a centralized manner using global network information. In this article, we study how to apply SDN concept to a wireless meshnetwork that has been widely adopted by various applications.
We first propose a novel architecture of SD-WMNs, and identify several critical challenges. Since wireless spectrum is a scarce resource that is shared by both data and control traffic in SD-WMNs, we propose three spectrum allocation and scheduling algorithms, namely FB-NS, NFB-NS, and NFB-S that orchestrate both control and data traffic. Finally, performance is evaluated via extensive simulations.