Control and Management of Multiple RATs in Wireless Networks: An SDN Approach

Multiple Radio Access Technologies (RATs) co-exist within today's mobile broadband networks, and each of these RATs is controlled by a different set of entities, leading to fragmented network control. This may lead to sub-optimal utilization of the overall network resources. In this paper, we propose a novel Software Defined Networking (SDN) based network architecture for unified control of multiple RATs and provide a framework for improved network performance over those of the present-day architectures. The proposed architecture enables end-to-end network control while preserving scalability with the help of network slicing. We develop an evaluation platform based on network simulator-3 (ns-3) in accordance with the proposed architecture. We also demonstrate the performance improvements provided by the proposed architecture through simulations.