Wireless Interface Agent for SDN mmWave Multi-hop Networks: Design and Experimental Evaluation

Millimeter wave (mmwave) communications will likely be an enabler for 5G due to its multi-gigabit per second throughput capabilities. Furthermore,mmWave communications will have to be integrated in a new redesigned network required by 5G to fulfill its ambitious targets. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a management agent for wireless devices deployed in a heterogeneous SDN wireless multi-hop research platform featuring mmwave communications for crosshauling (backhaul and fronthaul) purposes. The performance of the deployed mmwave network, based on the IEEE 802.11ad standard, is measured employing this agent. We measure the downtime in the presence of link up/down events, with obtained response times in the order of 10s-to-100s of milliseconds depending on the case. Furthermore, the TCP performance over the multi-hop 802.11ad mmwave network is also experimentally evaluated. In fact, TCP throughput up to around 800Mbps are obtained for single and multi-hop scenarios despite neighboring links using the same channel. Finally, one can also observe the impact of MTU size on TCP throughput, which may hinder the full exploitation of the mmWave link capacity when combined with other transport technologies, since the advantages of big MTUs (much bigger than the typical 1500 bytes) offered by mmwave devices may not be reaped.