Design of scalable SDN based eMBMS/WLAN network architecture assisted by Fog Computing

For flexibly providing bandwidth-intensive services to a number of multi-radio users (MR-UEs) in cellular heterogeneous networks, Software Defined Networking (SDN) emerges as an evolutionary notion because of its centralized management. However, such SDN based fully-centralized control architecture of cellular networks still suffer from scalability issues, fault tolerance, latency problems etc. Besides, fog computing is introduced as an extension of cloud computing from core to the edges of network, bringing real-time and latency-sensitive services close to the users. Furthermore, a number of multicast users can be served through Device-to-device (D2D) communication without effecting the backhaul network. In this paper, we design a novel semi-centralized architecture for eMBMS/WLAN heterogeneous network which is assisted by multi-level control plane and fog nodes, to efficiently serve D2D multicast users. Given the access points have capability to be transformed into configurable fog nodes, we believe that popular multicast content can be cached by fog nodes to serve MR-UEs in less time. Under the supervision of one controller, multiple local controllers collaborate towards reliable multicasting in SDN-based heterogeneous networks.