Established in Q42019, the TIP OpenWiFi solution goal has been to break vendor lock-in through disaggregation architectures, open APIs—with common embedded software and management that is both community- and commercially-supported.

Available for use as a completely Open Source reference, ODM vendors can easily adopt TIP OpenWiFi platforms as either a complimentary addition to hardware offers or as an entirely TIP OpenWiFi based hardware offer.

Vendors and operators can use the community project as a complete solution, extend the software stack based on design goals, or use only the components desired for deployment. The OpenWiFi community includes hardware ODM vendors, software DevOps, OEM, and System Integrators.

For more information on Telecom Infra Project and the Open Converged Wireless - OpenWiFi initiative please visit: https://telecominfraproject.com/openwifi/

TIP OpenWiFi is a community-developed, disaggregated Wi-Fi software system, offered as free open-source software that includes a cloud SDK and an enterprise-grade Access Point (AP) firmware, designed and validated to work seamlessly together.

Contribute to the project

Membership to the TIP OpenWiFi project is free with the request to contribute as code, test, documentation or deployment. Participation and focus is governed by the PG Charter, Antitrust Guidelines and IPR Policies.

• Telecom Infra Project Bylaws

• Telecom Infra Project Organizational documents

• TIP Document IPR Policy

Meta Connectivity, is a PG champion of TIP OpenWiFi. All source code in the program is subject to BSD-3 license and in the public domain. No internal Meta tooling or IP is involved in the project.

Membership has its privilege

To contribute to the project, you must become a member of TIP and the OCW PG.

After you become a member, you can access the following resources:

• OpenWiFi project WiKi in Confluence

• Development information in JIRA

• Team collaboration and communication via TIP Slack

• Team meetings

The TIP OpenWiFi group holds regular meetings with Meta Connectivity Development team members with stand up calls every Monday. PG member meetings are monthly on first Monday.

For meeting schedules and additional information, see the OpenWiFi Project Confluence wiki.

The OpenWiFi SDK is designed to enable Cloud Partners to consume basic southbound device management and device discovery. This is similar to augmenting a southbound device adapter for many orchestration or automation systems.

OpenWiFi Microservices

The OpenWiFi SDK also offers microservices for Cloud Partners including the following:

• Firmware Management

• Device Provisioning

• Subscriber Portal

• Analytics

• User Interface

This independent microservice approach has numerous advantages including ease of integration, ability to leverage more of the stack to accelerate product availability or support only device communication and discovery for partners who seek to maintain more functionality within their own application.

Step 1 : Join

If your organization is not already a TIP Open Converged Wireless Project Group (OCW PG) member, consider signing up. Joining the OCW PG is free as a Software Participation Tier in TIP.

Step 2 : Slack, Keys & Atlassian Tools

Introduce your organization to the Community on Slack. All Community members have access to Telecom Infra Project Slack. Send a message to the #general and #open-wifi-ucentral Slack channels.

Send an email to licensekeys@telecominfraproject.com to request onboarding as a supplier for OpenWiFi Cloud. All OpenWiFi Gateway services in the SDK require a signed key to terminate incoming device connections in the southbound interface.

Ensure your GitHub account is linked in your Telecom Infra Project user profile. Linking your GitHub account to your TIP user account enables write access to OpenWiFi repositories. Also confirm that the Atlassian link is also present in your user profile.

Step 3 : Integration

The OpenWiFi SDK uses OpenAPI 3.0 compliant northbound Rest API and Kafka for message bus topics. Typical CRUD actions occur via the Rest API. Kafka presents topics for device discovery and all telemetry captured from the network edge.

Summary

Integrations that use the published interfaces are the easiest approach to starting with OpenWiFi SDK.

What is OpenWiFi?

TIP OpenWiFi is an open source community project that believes in democratizing premium Wi-Fi experiences for multiple market use cases. The TIP approach to OpenWiFi creates an open source disaggregated technology stack without any vendor lock in.

Features normally only present in commercial enterprise WLAN offerings are available in TIP OpenWiFi. These premium Wi-Fi features enable a number of market solutions for developers, integrators and operators to explore.

TIP OpenWiFi stack enables commercial integrations via cloud native open source services for management and network visibility combined with an open source AP firmware operating system tested nightly.

TIP OpenWiFi Continuous Integration quality testing runs nightly exercising thousands of Wi-Fi performance, conformance and feature unit tests.

Support for a broad range of device platforms with the ability for Community to contribute additional device support and or cloud features sets TIP OpenWiFi apart from all other open projects.

Joining TIP and the OpenWiFi project is both free and easy.

Getting Started

The most common use cases for TIP OpenWiFi are managed WLAN most often associated with premium enterprise Wi-Fi service offerings. TIP OpenWiFi presents these premium features over a number of deployment options.

TIP OpenWiFi devices have management and telemetry exposed via a single websocket to the OpenWiFi Gateway (OWGW) microservice. The OWGW is supported by database, message bus, and the OpenWiFi Security (OWSEC) microservice for northbound API integration. This represents the minimum to deploy TIP OpenWiFi.

This minimum set of services enables commercial vendor integration adding TIP OpenWiFi device support to existing Wi-Fi controllers.

Refer to the sections on SDK Installation and Overview for further information.

For additional value added services, TIP OpenWiFi also provides User Interface, Firmware Management, Provisioning and Analytics services. All services are independently deployed and integrated based on commercial adoption model.

High Level Features

Each OpenWiFi AP offers:

• Multiple topologies including :

  • Local Breakout

  • Overlay including PPPoE, L2TP, L2oGRE

  • IEEE802.11s Mesh and Wireless Distribution System

  • Bridging, Virtual LAN, VxLAN, NAT Gateway

• Multiple authentications including WPA, WPA2, WPA3, Enterprise Radius models, M-PSK

• Passpoint R1 and R2 Mobile Offload

• Encrypted Zero Touch Provisioning and Cloud Discovery

• Autonomous RRM and Channel Control

• Wi-Fi Agile Multiband

• Multi-VAP including topology features per VAP

• Dynamic Air Time Fairness

• Over the air EDCH QoS, WMM QoS, 802.11-2016 Enterprise QoS

• Captive Portal

• Station and Network Telemetry

Cloud SDK in OpenWiFi offers:

• Zero Touch Provisioning & Discovery

• Integration Northbound Interface (NBI) RESTful

• Data model driven OpenAPI design

• Enterprise Message Bus data access

• Cloud Native & Agnostic micro services

  • Gateway Southbound

  • Security Northbound

  • Firmware Management

  • Web User Interface

  • Provisioning

  • Analytics

OpenWiFi AP Detail List:

• Wi-Fi 5 (ac) Wi-Fi 6 (ax) Wi-Fi 6E

• Dual Bank Bootloader

• Multi-SSID per Radio

• SSID Authentications: WPA/WPA2/WPA3 - Mixed, Personal, Enterprise

• 802.1Q VLAN per SSID

• 802.1d Bridge Mode per SSID

• RADIUS Accounting, Interim-Accounting, NAS-IP, CUI

• Network Address Translation Gateway Mode Operation

• Network Time Protocol Client

• Management VLAN

• Wi-Fi 6 (ax) Specific

  • BSS Coloring

  • UL/DL OFDMA sub-carrier allocation

  • Channel Switch Announcement

• Wi-Fi General Features

  • WMM® - Wi-Fi Multi Media

    • UAPSD Procedures (Unscheduled Power Save)

    • Upstream/Downstream Queues & L3 DSCP

    • Over The Air QoS EDCH Procedures

• WMM-Admission Control (AC)

• WMM-Power Save (PS)

• Wi-Fi Optimized Connectivity

  • (ai) Fast Initial Link Support

• Wi-Fi Agile Multiband

  • (k) Client Radio Resource Management - Directed Steering

  • (v) Network Assisted Roaming

  • (r) Fast BSS Transition

• Protected Management Frames (PMF)

  • (w) Management Frame Encryption

• Channel Switch Announcement (CSA)

• Dynamic Frequency Selection & Transmit Power Control (DFS/TPC)

• Beacon Rate

• Min Client Noise Immunity

• Basic Rate Control

• De-Auth RSSI Control

• Burst Beacon Support

• Per SSID Client Rate Limiting

• Promiscuous Mode Support

• Additional TIP AP NOS Features

  • ISP WAN Profiles ( PPPoE, L2TP, L2oGRE )

  • Embedded Captive Portal (Local Splash non-auth)

  • Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP)

  • Dynamic Airtime Fairness

  • Service Flow QoS

  • Wireline & Wireless Tracing (PCAP Cloud Remote Troubleshooting)

  • Health Check Reports

  • Local Provisioning over SSID (when Cloud or WAN down)

  • Multimedia Heuristics (Detection of Unified Communication Sessions)

  • SSID Rate Limiting

  • GPS Reporting

  • Autonomous RRM Client Steering

  • Client / AP / Network Metric Telemetry

Cloud SDK additional features

• Provisioning

  • Device Identity (Model, MAC, Serial Number)

  • Device Software Upgrade

  • Multiple SSID Configuration

  • Bandwidth Rate Control per SSID

  • Multi-Radio 2.4/5/6GHz control

  • AP Network Mode Control (Bridge/NAT mode)

  • Security (WPA-Personal/WPA & WPA2/3 Personal Mixed/WPA & WPA2/3 Enterprise Mixed/WPA2/3 Personal/WPA2/3 Enterprise/WEP)

  • VLAN per SSID

  • VxLAN port configuration

  • NTP Enable/Disable

  • RTLS (Location Services) Enable/Disable

• RF Control

  • IEEE802.11r Fast BSS Transition per Radio Control

  • IEEE802.11k RRM Radio Information per Radio Control

  • IEEE802.11v Network Assisted Roaming per Radio Control

  • RRM Location AP Channel (uChannel) Provisioning

  • RRM Location Client Steering (uSteer) Threshold Provisioning

• Remote Troubleshooting and Service Assurance

  • Syslog

  • Health Check Reports

    • Remote DHCP, RADIUS, UE Network Analysis

  • Remote TTY Shell

  • Remote Packet Capture Analysis

How to contribute

TIP OpenWiFi supports Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac), Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) and Wi-Fi 6E (6GHz 802.11ax) in a mix of indoor and outdoor, ceiling to wall, desk, pole and strand environments.

For TIP OpenWiFi, a mix of ODMs deliver a diverse portfolio including CIG, Actiontech, EdgeCore, Cybertan, Arcadyan, Wallys, Lindsay, HFCL and Inventum.

Currently supported hardware

The list of supported hardware continues to grow. TIP members can access the Confluence site that lists all currently supported hardware.