King's College London

Network access control is an established security
method that only grants access to authorised devices. The 802.1X
standard defines the mechanisms for implementing network access
control in legacy networks. However, its implementation requires
hardware and software components that are not commonly found
in small deployments and also adds to the complexity of the
network and the deployment time. The Software-defined Networking
(SDN) offers an opportunity to develop new network access control
solutions, among other things, that can be used to simplify and speed
up the implementation and deployment of small, localised sensor
networks. In this paper we demonstrate how SDN can be used to
develop a basic network access control service without using 802.1X
software and hardware while also offering the ability to adjust
the available bandwidth and network access policy per device. The
proposed solution provides quick and flexible network deployments
for IoT sensor networks and other types of M2M communication.
We implement our proposed architecture using OpenDaylight and
OpenFlow switches and evaluate its performance by running tests
with multiple client devices and various policies. Our results show
that the studied approach can be a valid approach for small to
medium sized networks that requires quick and low-cost deployment
and high flexibility in terms of adding new devices.