NxWLAN: Neighborhood eXtensible WLAN
Piotr Gaw{\l}owicz, Sven Zehl, Anatolij Zubow, Adam Wolisz

TL;DR
NxWLAN enables secure, zero-configuration extension of home WLANs using neighboring access points, improving coverage and load balancing without revealing encryption keys, demonstrated through a prototype on off-the-shelf hardware.
Contribution
This paper introduces NxWLAN, a novel virtualization-based system allowing secure, seamless WLAN extension via neighboring APs with minimal configuration and no key sharing.
Findings
Feasibility demonstrated on a small indoor testbed.
Secure extension without revealing WPA2 keys.
Open source implementation available.
Abstract
The increased usage of IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN (WLAN) in residential environments by unexperienced users leads to dense, unplanned and chaotic residential WLAN deployments. Often WLAN Access Points (APs) are deployed unprofitable in terms of radio coverage and interference conditions. In many cases the usage of the neighbor's AP would be beneficial as it would provide better radio coverage in some parts of the residential user's apartment. Moreover, the network performance can be dramatically improved by balancing the network load over spatially co-located APs. We address this problem by presenting Neighborhood extensible WLAN (NxWLAN) which enables the secure extension of user's home WLANs through usage of neighboring APs in residential environments with zero configuration efforts and without revealing WPA2 encryption keys to untrusted neighbor APs. NxWLAN makes use of…
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Taxonomy
TopicsWireless Networks and Protocols · Mobile Ad Hoc Networks · Opportunistic and Delay-Tolerant Networks
