A Practical Data Forwarding Path Selecting Method for Software-Defined 5G Networking

The software-defined 5G networking is one of the most promising 5G network architectures. Software Defined Networking (SDN) is an essential technology in such network architecture, which interconnects the virtualized network functions and is responsible for creating data forwarding paths. In this paper, we propose a practical data forwarding path selecting method to effectively select high-quality main and backup paths. Specifically, we propose a modified LKH algorithm by adopting directed K-OPT operations to find a valid route path. Then, we introduce a single path searching algorithm and a dual path searching algorithm by combining a complexity reducing technique called node scaling and two types of penalties. The comparative results over a HUAWEI official data set and a real network data set demonstrate that the proposed path selecting method, compared with previous path selecting methods, achieves a much better overall performance in terms of the least overlapping directed edges, low total path cost and minimal path searching time.