An SDN-Based Architecture for Next-Generation Wireless Networks

With the increase of new devices and applications, the past decade has witnessed exponential growth of traffic volume in communication networks. This triggers much effort for designing NWNs in both academia and industry. To gain natural evolution and meet emerging requirements, it is widely agreed that NWNs shall be multi-tier with overlay coverage and small cell deployment. However, dense deployment of small cells introduces numerous challenges, including inconsistent interfaces, frequent handovers, and extensive backhauling. By decomposing the control plane and data plane, SDN offers a new direction to address the above challenges. In this article, by introducing SDNC, we propose an intelligent wireless network architecture for NWNs. In our architecture, virtual RATs design using interface sets is brought up to support diverse services. Along with our earlier handover approach, low handover latency between heterogeneous networks is achieved. Furthermore, we present SH mechanisms targeted at different failure cases in backhaul connections. With programmability provided by SDN, the aforementioned functions can be deployed as modules in the SDNC. Experimental results validate the efficiency of our proposal.