Software-Defined Mobile Cloud: Architecture, services and use cases

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging technology which brings flexibility and programmability to networks and introduces new services and features. However, most SDN architectures have been designed for wired infrastructures, especially in the data center space, and primary trends for wireless and mobile SDN are on the access network and the wireless backhaul. In this paper, we propose several designs for SDN-based Mobile Cloud architectures, focusing on Ad hoc networks. We present the required core components to build SDN-based Mobile Cloud, including variations that are required to accommodate different wireless environments, such as mobility and unreliable wireless link conditions. We also introduce several instances of the proposed architectures based on frequency selection of wireless transmission that are designed around different use cases of SDN-based Mobile Cloud. We demonstrate the feasibility of our architecture by implementing SDN-based routing in the mobile cloud and comparing it with traditional Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) routing. The feasibility of our architecture is shown by achieving high packet delivery ratio with acceptable overhead.