Software defined networking integration with mobile network towards scalable and programmable core

Abstract

The huge appreciation received by the Software Defined Networking (SDN), Network Functions Virtualization, and Cloud Computing in latest years pushed researchers, vendors, and mobile network operators to investigate the possibility of innovative design that integrates these technologies in cellular network aiming to overcome the limitations posed by currently deployed mobile networks and cope with the increasing demands of mobile customers. This thesis describes an experimental investigation, design, implementation and evaluation of three different solutions to integrate SDN with mobile network. The first two approaches exploit the evolution of SDN where the control plane of the current LTE entities like the Mobility Management Entity, Serving Gateway and Packet Data Network Gateway are running as packages in an SDN controller or as VMs running in a cloud environment, while the data plane entities are represented by Openflow switches and eNodeBs. The third approach uses SDN as an add-on to the backhaul of the existing cellular network to introduce variety of new services, selective traffic offloading to cloud-based infrastructure is used to demonstrate the advantage and disadvantage of different solution to implement this approach. Whereas all the proposed solutions have been proven to provide enhancement to the system performance. The first solution shows that utilizing SDN helps to reduce the signalling load, provides faster recovery time and better resource utilization. Extending Openflow protocol plugin to support mobile network operations reduce the initial attachment signalling loads by 66% and serving gateway failover by 40%. In the Second solution, utilizing SDN enhanced the core network links utilization by 25% compared to the current mobile network implementation. Also, it reduced queuing time and the packet loss by up to 4% when the network is congested, which contributes to reduce the end-to-end delay by up to 27.9%. In the last solution, SDN is utilized to move the content near to the mobile users, which contributes to reduce the end-to-end delay of the delay sensitive traffic. The packet processing time in the third approach is much less that the first two approaches which contributes to provide better performance in term of end-to-end delay.