Software defined networking (SDN) for reliable user connectivity in 5G networks

Reliability was, and still is, a major concern for telecoms operators. Network outage can potentially produce high penalty in terms of revenue and user quality of experience. In this paper, we advocate that the data plane reliability can be easily improved when the Software Defined Networking (SDN) concept is incorporated into LTE/EPC networks. As a way to ensure user connectivity be available even in case of network equipment failures, we propose two recovery modes: (i) automatic tunnel re-establishment and (ii) on-demand tunnel re-establishment. Through simulations, we show that those mechanisms outperform the recovery mechanism previously proposed in 3GPP standards.