SplitAP: Leveraging Wireless Network Virtualization for Flexible Sharing of WLANs

Providing air-time guarantees across a group of clients forms a fundamental building block in sharing an Access Point (AP) across different virtual network providers. Though this problem has a relatively simple solution for downlink group scheduling through traffic engineering at the AP, solving this problem for UpLink (UL) traffic presents a challenge for fair sharing of wireless hotspots. Among other issues, the mechanism for uplink traffic control has to scale across a large user base, and provide flexible operation irrespective of the client channel conditions and network loads.