Design and Evaluation of a Hierarchical SDN Control Plane for 5G Transport Networks

Software-defined networking is at the root of future 5G network design. Among others, it allows for automated network reconfiguration and network slicing support. In this paper we present an implementation of a hierarchical control plane in the transport network architecture envisioned by the 5G-PICTURE project. We analyze the implementation of the slicing mechanism at the network edge and the end-to-end path establishment procedure, which involves interactions within a hierarchy of controllers. We also evaluate the latency performance of our control plane solution, by means of testbed experimentation.