Active Networking based Service Infrastructure for Cellular WLANs

An approach of managing a service infrastructure for wireless local area networks (WLANs) is presented. This approach uses Active Network technology as developed in the IST project FAIN in order to deploy and run services at appropriate locations in the network. By introducing a service which monitors traffic and adaptively controls the access of mobile users it is possible to dynamically bind particular users to specific access points, thus transforming conventional WLAN to cellular WLAN. This service is made up from components in the data and control plane of the network. Additional components in the management plane are used for the deployment and runtime management of the service components. The usefulness of this approach is corroborated with the outline of key scenarios.