A Comparative Analysis between Centralized Routing and Distributed Routing in Multi-Hop Wireless Networks

A growing desire for granular network control, automation, virtualization and much more, has contributed to the emergence of Software Defined Networking (SDN) as a prominent research area. Though originally developed for wired networks, benefits of the centralized routing approach are now being leveraged for wireless network applications. These include SDN-based Multi-hop Wireless Networks (MWNs), as potential alternatives to traditional MWNs. This thesis presents a Software Defined Multi-hop Wireless Network (SDMWN) solution, with standard centralized routing characteristics and full mobility capabilities, evaluated against distributed routing in an equivalent traditional MWN architecture. Our emulation results, obtained with Mininet-WiFi, demonstrate a good degree of potential for SDMWN, when operating under controlled (mobile) network conditions. By guaranteeing the availability of potential links between every node, SDMWN outperforms the traditional MWN, by about 15% and 65 ms, for Ping Success Rate and Round-Trip Time respectively. However, this comes at a relatively high cost of overhead.