  Software Defined Networking (SDN) drastically changes the meaning and process
of designing, building, testing, and operating networks. The current support
for wireless net- working in SDN technologies has lagged behind its development
and deployment for wired networks. The purpose of this work is to bring
principled support for wireless access networks so that they can receive the
same level of programmability as wireline interfaces. Specifically we aim to
integrate wireless protocols into the general SDN framework by proposing a new
set of abstractions in wireless devices and the interfaces to manipulate them.
We validate our approach by implementing our design as an extension of an
existing OpenFlow data plane and deploying it in an IEEE 802.11 access point.
We demonstrate the viability of software-defined wireless access networks by
developing and testing a wireless handoff application. The results of the
exper- iment show that our framework is capable of providing new capabilities
in an efficient manner.
