Emulating a Software Defined LTE Radio Access Network Towards 5G

This paper evaluates the performance of a Software Defined Network (SDN) and the respective OpenFlow (OF) protocol, when supporting a Long Term Evolution (LTE) Radio Access Network (RAN). The main objective is to understand the impact of the new Centralized Radio Access Network (C-RAN) architecture, using a SDN based LTE network (when compared to conventional LTE networks), in a solution towards Fifth Generation (5G) implementation. Several simulations were performed using the SDN emulator Mininet-Wifi platform, which was adapted to produce use cases regarding a SDN based LTE topology. This platform uses WiFi as radio technology. However, and since this is an open source platform, changes were introduced in order to include a LTE RAN parametrization based on LTE technology standards. The latency and throughput are the used Quality of Service (QoS) performance metrics. The throughput results led to spectral efficiency values close to each considered modulation maximum. The obtained average values of latency, 15.72, 16.17 and 16.50 ms for packets of 32, 1000 and 1500 bytes respectively, revealed to be lower than 20 ms, which is the LTE requirement established by 3GPP.