Abstract-The tremendous growth of services and costumers' demands have rendered traditional networks inefficient. Telecommunication operators need a more flexible, scalable, faster and programmable architecture to offer users these new services. Software Defined Networking (SDN) has emerged as a natural solution to this situation as it enables network programmability. This article provides a review of the SDN architectures applied to fifth generation (5G) networks. In this work, the prime focus is a proposal of control plane for a 5G architecture with a hybrid hierarchical set of controllers. The architecture is based on a federation of multiple sub-network controllers, each managing only a section of the network, conveniently coordinated by a hierarchically-superior controller. The use of Data Distribution Service (DDS) as a standard of the Object Management Group (OMG) is explored to improve the performance of the proposed architecture. DDS is used taking into account empirical results which have demonstrated a significant improvement in the performance compared to other existing solutions that do not use DDS. We illustrate the flexibility of our approach by presenting some use cases describing how the different elements of this architecture works.
Software-defined networks (SDNs) have caused a paradigm shift in communication networks as they enable network programmability using either centralized or distributed controllers. With the development of the industry and society, new verticals have emerged, such as Industry 4.0, cooperative sensing and augmented reality. These verticals require network robustness and availability, which forces the use of distributed domains to improve network scalability and resilience. To this aim, this paper proposes a new solution to distribute SDN domains by using Data Distribution Services (DDS). The DDS allows the exchange of network information, synchronization among controllers and auto-discovery. Moreover, it increases the control plane robustness, an important characteristic in 5G networks (e.g., if a controller fails, its resources and devices can be managed by other controllers in a short amount of time as they already know this information). To verify the effectiveness of the DDS, we design a testbed by integrating the DDS in SDN controllers and deploying these controllers in different regions of Spain. The communication among the controllers was evaluated in terms of latency and overhead. Index Terms-software-defined networks, data distribution service, testbed, hierarchical architecture • A communication mechanism to logically distribute SDN controllers (i.e, flat or hierarchical architecture).
This paper studies the problem of the dynamic scaling and load balancing of transparent virtualized network functions (VNFs). It analyzes different particularities of this problem, such as loop avoidance when performing scaling-out actions, and bidirectional flow affinity. To address this problem, a software-defined networking (SDN)-based solution is implemented consisting of two SDN controllers and two OpenFlow switches (OFSs). In this approach, the SDN controllers run the solution logic (i.e., monitoring, scaling, and load-balancing modules). According to the SDN controllers instructions, the OFSs are responsible for redirecting traffic to and from the VNF clusters (i.e., load-balancing strategy). Several experiments were conducted to validate the feasibility of this proposed solution on a real testbed. Through connectivity tests, not only could end-to-end (E2E) traffic be successfully achieved through the VNF cluster, but the bidirectional flow affinity strategy was also found to perform well because it could simultaneously create flow rules in both switches. Moreover, the selected CPU-based load-balancing method guaranteed an average imbalance below 10% while ensuring that new incoming traffic was redirected to the least loaded instance without requiring packet modification. Additionally, the designed monitoring function was able to detect failures in the set of active members in near real-time and active new instances in less than a minute. Likewise, the proposed auto-scaling module had a quick response to traffic changes. Our solution showed that the use of SDN controllers along with OFS provides great flexibility to implement different load-balancing, scaling, and monitoring strategies.
Because of developments in society and technology, new services and use cases have emerged, such as vehicle-to-everything communication and smart manufacturing. Some of these services have stringent requirements in terms of reliability, bandwidth, and network response time and to meet them, deploying network functions (NFs) closer to users is necessary. Doing so will lead to an increase in costs and the number of NFs. Under such circumstances, the use of optimization strategies for the placement of NFs is crucial to offer Quality of Service (QoS) in a cost-effective manner. In this vein, this paper addresses the User Plane Functions Placement (UPFP) problem in 5G networks. The UPFP is modeled as a Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) problem aimed at determining the optimal number and location of User Plane Functions (UPFs). Two optimization models are proposed that considered various parameters, such as latency, reliability and user mobility. To evaluate their performance, two services under the Ultra-Reliable and Low-Latency Communication (URLLC) category were selected. The acquired results showcase the effectiveness of our solutions.
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