WiMoVE: An Architecture for Large Wi-Fi Systems

In large Wi-Fi systems, broadcast traffic can become a problem, taking up airtime without providing benefits for receiving stations. Countermeasures like traffic filtering achieve acceptable performance, but commonly break end-user functionality. To improve on this, we identify design trade-offs and propose a new architecture called WiMoVE. By using many small Layer 2 (L2) overlay networks, WiMoVE reduces broadcast transmissions while providing end users with unfiltered L2 domains. With a prototype implementation, we show that our approach is technologically feasible.