MANET-oriented SDN: Motivations, Challenges, and a Solution Prototype

Software Defined Networking (SDN), with its clear distinction of control and data planes, as well with its simple paradigm of logically centralized controller with global visibility of the whole targeted network status, is gaining momentum in different scenarios. However, its effective exploitation in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) is still an open research issue, mainly due to the peculiar dynamicity of the related environments (e.g., in the case of spontaneous MANETs) and to the need to exploit locality considerations to achieve efficient solutions. Here we originally present an architecture and an associated prototype for SDN-based quality management of selected traffic flows, which advance the state-of-the-art in the field by i) allowing high flexibility via deployment of new flow management policies at provisioning time, ii) properly handling node join/leave events, and, most relevant, iii) determining MANET 'islands', usually managed by separated SDN controllers that can seldom interact to federate their management decisions. In addition to design/implementation insights and to the availability of the prototype code, this paper provides the community with a significant and novel contribution in terms of first experimental performance results, which show the feasibility and the effectiveness of the proposed approach.