Empowering 5G Mobile Devices With Network Softwarization

The fifth generation of mobile wireless networks (5G) will provide an infrastructure with abundant and reliable connectivity for innovative and complicated applications. In 5G, 5G mobile devices, which will have improved computing resources for such applications, play an essential role. However, the network stack of 5G devices may continue to be borrowed from 4G legacy operating systems, thereby degrading user experience. In this paper, we posit that 5G users should have flexibility in utilizing networks and gain more awareness of network selection. To this end, we exploit network softwarization technologies to empower 5G devices. We then devise 5GSoft, a novel softwarized networking stack on each 5G mobile device. 5GSoft includes wireless virtualization to relax the dependence on hardware, thereby enabling sharing and multiple access. The 5GSoft device can concurrently exploit surrounding wireless networks using software-defined networking. Finally, the 5GSoft device is aware of network selection for each application process by applying network namespace. Qualitative evaluation of 5GSoft, in comparison to other approaches, highlights its effectiveness in terms of awareness and flexibility provision. Moreover, real experiments show that the virtualization in 5GSoft has negligible overhead.