Towards flexbile SDN-based management for cloud-based mobile networks

Abstract

New technologies and architectures arise in the telecommunications industry in order to cater to the ever growing demands in terms of resource utilization, manageability and user experience. C-RAN and SDN represent two such novel paradigms, both advocating for centralization of a set of resources or control capabilities respectively. The C-RAN architecture requires a significant amount of link capacity which may be a prohibitive factor in its adoption hence an obvious solution is to intelligently share the physical infrastructure among several virtual operators. In this context, a new challenge is to flexibly manage the sharing of the infrastructure. This paper argues that a centralized, SDN-based approach can bring the needed flexibility in the management of the C-RAN. More specifically, this paper proposes a policy-centric management framework, which uses the SDN architecture to enforce various rules for sharing the physical infrastructure. A testbed based on Floodlight and Mininet has been implemented to show the benefits of using this automatic management tool for sharing the mobile site capacity.