Ultra Reliable Communication for Robot Mobility enabled by SDN Splitting of WiFi Functions

Abstract

Wireless networks have become in the last years a key enabling technology for cloud-enabled robots. Among those, the usage of WiFi is a first choice due to its almost ubiquitous use nowadays. However, WiFi suffers from crucial issues like spectrum interference, connectivity losses, long delay for client association and high latency handover. This work proposes a novel architectural split of the WiFi functionalities based on an enhanced software-defined wireless architecture. Cloud-enabled robots scenarios are addressed to derive results showing that the proposed architecture allows uninterrupted communication during handovers, and a quicker failover management.