Control Plane Design for Wi-Fi Networks

PhD Thesis Proposal Defence


Title: "Control Plane Design for Wi-Fi Networks"

by

Mr. Jiansong ZHANG


Abstract:

In traditional Wi-Fi systems, data plane and control plane are simply coupled 
in time domain that data and control transmissions are multiplexed over packet 
exchanges. This coupled control plane is becoming the bottleneck of performance 
while the physical layer data rate increases dramatically. For example, the per 
packet constant control overhead for shared channel access induces significant 
efficiency issue. Therefore, despite the orders of increase in physical layer 
data rate, real throughput in Wi-Fi systems is usually bounded by the control 
overhead and consequently increases slowly. On the other hand, Wi-Fi systems 
keep suffering from fairness, latency and reliability problems because of the 
coupled control plane. As a consequence, guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS) in 
Wi-Fi networks is never easy to achieve.

In this thesis proposal, various possibilities of decoupled control plane 
design are explored for the purpose of improving performance for current Wi-Fi 
systems. Specifically, two efforts of decoupled control channels are presented 
with validation and evaluation. Based on the experience of these individual 
efforts, a full architecture of decoupled control plane for enhancing Wi-Fi 
based Wireless LAN is proposed.


Date:			Monday, 17 March 2014

Time:                   2:00pm - 4:00pm

Venue:                  Room 5503
                         lifts 25/26

Committee Members:	Prof. Qian Zhang (Supervisor)
 			Prof. Gary Chan (Chairperson)
 			Dr. Kai Chen
 			Prof. Bo Li


**** ALL are Welcome ****