A growing desire
for granular network control, automation, virtualization and much more, has
contributed to the emergence of Software Defined Networking (SDN) as a
prominent research area. Though originally developed for wired networks,
benefits of the centralized routing approach are now being leveraged for
wireless network applications. These include SDN-based Multi-hop Wireless
Networks (MWNs), as potential alternatives to traditional MWNs. This thesis
presents a Software Defined Multi-hop Wireless Network (SDMWN) solution, with
standard centralized routing characteristics and full mobility capabilities,
evaluated against distributed routing in an equivalent traditional MWN
architecture. Our emulation results, obtained with Mininet-WiFi,
demonstrate a good degree of potential for SDMWN, when operating under
controlled (mobile) network conditions. By guaranteeing the availability of
potential links between every node, SDMWN outperforms the traditional MWN, by
about 15% and 65 ms, for Ping Success Rate and
Round-Trip Time respectively. However, this comes at a relatively high cost of
overhead.