Designing a high performance WLAN testbed for centralized control

In this paper, we describe a wireless testbed for centralized control. Centralized WLAN systems make use of a central controller that dynamically configures the network based on measured environmental conditions. Such networks are becoming increasingly common in many enterprise and campus deployments today. However, many aspects of centralized WLAN architectures, such as wired delay and delay jitter properties are poorly understood. This necessitates an in-depth empirical study of such systems. We describe the design issues in building a large-scale WLAN testbed for evaluating centralized control algorithms. The need for centralized control introduces some key requirements that cannot be met by earlier designs. We discuss these requirements, show how they are met by our testbed, and present experimental results that showcase the testbed´s unique characteristics.