Addressing the eduroam inter-domain mobility problem through virtual AP

Abstract

The Education Roaming (eduroam) is a widely spread federation of Wi-Fi networks that allows users to freely roam between providers. The key to eduroam’s massive adoption has been the fact that a single global network identifier is used across all the federated Wi-Fi networks. However, when multiple eduroam networks are deployed in an overlapping geographical area, the current design may cause client devices to inadvertently roam between providers, hence potentially disrupting applications and hindering network planning. In this paper we study how virtual Access Points (vAPs) can be used to address the inter-domain mobility problem in eduroam. Our main contribution is a novel mechanism to steer clients across vAPs, which mitigates unintended handovers. The proposed extensions have been validated experimentally considering a wide range of commercial Wi-Fi clients available in the market.