• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.1063-1082
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• 2018

The concept of SDN (Software Defined Networking) endows the network with programmability and significantly improves the flexibility and extensibility of networks. Currently a plenty of research works on introducing SDN into wireless networks. Most of them focus on the innovation of the SDN based architectures but few consider how to realize the global perception of the network through the controller. In order to address this problem, a software defined carrier grade Wi-Fi framework called SWAN, is proposed firstly. Then based on the proposed SWAN architecture, a blueprint of introducing the traditional NSA (Network Situation Awareness) into SWAN is proposed and described in detail. Through perceiving various network data by a decentralized architecture and making comprehension and prediction on the perceived data, the proposed blueprint endows the controllers with the capability to aware of the current network situation and predict the near future situation. Meanwhile, the extensibility of the proposed blueprint makes it a universal solution for software defined wireless networks SDWNs rather than just for one case. Then we further research one typical use case of proposed NSA blueprint: network performance awareness (NPA). The subsequent comparison with other methods and result analysis not only well prove the effectiveness of proposed NPA but further provide a strong proof of the feasibility of proposed NSA blueprint.