TY - JOUR TI - Leveraging wireless network virtualizaton for flexible sharing of WLANs DO - https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/T3M908DG PY - 2010 AB - Providing air-time guarantees across a group of clients forms a fundamental building block in sharing an access point (AP) across different virtual network service providers. Though this problem has a relatively simple solution for downlink group scheduling through traffic engineering at the AP, solving this problem for uplink (UL) traffic presents a challenge for fair sharing of wireless hotspots. Among other issues, the mechanism for uplink traffic control has to scale across a large user base, and provide flexible operation irrespective of the client channel conditions and network traffic loads. In this thesis the SplitAP architecture is proposed that addresses the problem of sharing uplink airtime across groups of users by extending the idea of network virtualization. The architecture discussed in this thesis allows different algorithms to be deployed on it for enforcing UL airtime fairness across different client groups. In this thesis, the design features of the SplitAP architecture are highlighted followed by results from evaluation on a prototype deployed with the two algorithms for controlling UL group fairness like: (1) Linear Proportional Feedback Control (LPFC) and (2) Linear Proportional Feedback Control plus (LPFC+). Performance comparisons on the ORBIT testbed show that the proposed algorithms are capable of providing group air-time fairness across wireless clients irrespective of the network volume, and traffic type. The algorithms show up to 40% improvement with a modified Jain fairness index. KW - Electrical and Computer Engineering KW - Wireless LANs--Management KW - Routing protocols (Computer network protocols) LA - eng ER -