Programming Software-Defined wireless networks

Abstract

Programming a mobile network requires to account for multiple complex operations, such as allocating radio resources and monitoring interference. Nevertheless, the current Software-Defined Networking ecosystem provides little support for mobile networks in term of radio data-plane abstractions, controllers, and programming primitives. Starting from the consideration that WiFi is becoming an integral part of the 5G architecture, we present a set of programming abstractions modeling three fundamental aspects of a WiFi network, namely state management of wireless clients, resource provisioning, and network state collection. The proposed abstractions hide away the implementation details of the underlying wireless technology providing programmers with expressive tools to control the state of the network. We also describe a proof-of-concept implementation of a Software-Defined Radio Access Network controller for WiFi networks and a Python-based Software Development Kit leveraging the proposed abstractions. The resulting platform can be effectively leveraged in order to implement typical control tasks such as mobility management and traffic engineering as well as applications and services such as multicast video delivery and/or dynamic content caching.