The Case for a Modular WiFi Architecture

The increasing demand for flexibility in WiFi network deployments along with more stringent requirements on performance and security stand in stark contrast to today’s ossified and expensive WiFi architecture. In particular, today’s WiFi networks consists of a large number of control and data plane network functions that are either bundled into a single access controller running on proprietary hardware or are distributed across the network to run on WiFi access points. This approach does not properly reflect the broad and evolving diversity of scenarios in which WiFi is deployed. This paper makes the case for a functional decomposition of the WiFi: we want to support the allocation and composition of individual (virtualized and programmable) WiFi function blocks, where and when they are most useful. This allocation may also be adjusted dynamically, e.g., during a failover or a scale-out. We present our vision and a rough functional decomposition, describe our proposed LegoFi architecture, and explore how LegoFi can benefitial in four di↵erent deployment scenarios.