Date of Award

Fall 12-2010

Degree Type

Masters Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Computing

Committee Chair

Shaoen Wu

Committee Chair Department

Computing

Committee Member 2

Randy Buchanan

Committee Member 2 Department

Computing

Committee Member 3

Zhaoxian Zhou

Committee Member 3 Department

Computing

Abstract

The deployment of Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) has greatly increased in past years. Due to the large deployment of the WLAN, the immediate need of management platforms has been recognized, which has a significant impact on the performance of a WLAN. Although there are various vendor-specific and proprietary solutions available in the market to cope with the management of wireless LAN, they have problems in interoperability and compatibility. To address this issues, IETF has come up with the interoperability standard of management of WLANs devices, Control And Provisioning of Wireless Access Points (CAPWAP) protocol, which is still in the draft phase. Commercial implementation of this draft protocol from WLAN equipment vendors is rather expensive. Open source community, therefore, tried to provide free management solutions. An open source project called openCAPWAP was initiated. However, it lacks a graphic user interface that makes it hard to implement for novice network administrators or regular customers. Therefore, the researcher designed and developed a web interface framework that encapsulates openCAPWAP at the bottom to provide user-friendly management experience.

This application platform was designed to work with any remote web server in the public domain through which it can connect to access points or access controllers through a secure shell to configure them. This open platform is purely open source-based. It is operating system independent: it can be implemented on any open source environment such as regular Linux operating system or embedded operation system small form factor single board computers. The platform was designed and tested in a laboratory environment and a remote system. This development contributes to network administration in both network planning and operational management of the WLAN networks.

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