Generalized Software Defined Network Platform for Radio Access Networks
31 March 2016
Software defined networks (SDN) technology is rapidly emerging in telecommunications due to its capability to efficiently manage end-to-end networks by decoupling control plane and data plane and utilizing centralized controllers. This scalable and flexible control plane brings significant benefits to network management and maintenance. However while this advantageous situation is true for fixed networks, it has yet to happen for wireless networks since there is a lack of practical solutions for migrating Radio Access Networks (RAN) to software defined wireless networks (SDWN). In this paper, we present a design of wireless SDN controller based on OpenDayLight, one of the key industry-driven open source SDN controller candidates. We show how our framework can support typical use case and Self-Optimized Network algorithm. We conclude that our framework is highly flexible and can be leveraged for future wireless networks such as C-RAN and 5G.
