Software Defined Networking for Quality-aware Management of Multi-hop Spontaneous Networks

The Software Defined Networking (SDN) approach has recently demonstrated its effectiveness in simplifying the dynamic management of networking capabilities of infrastructure environments such as datacenters, e.g., by greatly enhancing the flexibility of dispatching features provided by industrial-grade switches. Inspired by the previous and more traditional scenario, we propose SDN adoption in infrastructure-less distributed multi-hop spontaneous networks based on the impromptu collaboration of fixed/mobile devices, with the goal of significantly improving the Quality of Service perceived by final users. To this purpose, the paper outlines our primary guidelines and reference architecture to support quality-aware packet dispatching. In particular, we present how collaborative nodes can exploit the SDN approach to appropriately manage the quality of different traffic flows, by avoiding undesired interference and by taking into consideration network capabilities/conditions and application-level requirements.