Article ID: 2017EBT0004
Applying Software Defined Network (SDN) technology to wireless networks are attracting much attention. Our previous study proposed a channel utilization method based on SDN/OpenFlow technology to improve the channel utilization efficiency of the multi-channel wireless backhaul network (WBN). However, since control messages are inherently transmitted with data traffic on a same channel in WBN, it inevitably degrades the network capacity. Specifically, the amount of control messages for collecting statistical information of each flow (FlowStats) linearly increases with the number of ongoing flows, thereby being the dominant overhead for backhaul networks. In this paper, we propose a new method that prevents the increase of control traffic while retaining the network performance of the previous method. Our proposed method uses statistical information of each interface (PortStats) instead of per-flow information (FlowStats), and handles multiple flows on the interface together if possible. Otherwise, to handle individual flow, we propose a way to estimate per-flow information without introducing extra control messages. Finally, we show that the proposed method offers the same performance with the previous method, while greatly reducing the amount of control traffic.
