The plethora of wireless devices resulting in a humongous data usage has already pushed the current mobile networks to their limit. Therefore the research and development of the next generation mobile network must take place now. In this regard a mobile network operator has a pivotal role in understanding the required performance of the coming fifth generation network, and also influencing its final design. This paper presents some network research topics seen from an operator's point of view. It provides an overview of some recent results within the following areas: network architecture utilizing network function virtualization and software defined networks, performance of deploying self-organized network functions, spectrum sharing, inter-cell interference reduction methods, and backhaul with gigabit radio links.
Today operators deploy functions like Deep PacketInspection, Caches, traffic optimization, NAT and Firewall on the SGi/Gi-LAN for subscribers accessing Internet based content/services. Currently these functions are deployed on dedicated hardware components from different vendors that most often need to be managed separately. This is not cost efficient and gives long lead times for new services. The main contribution of this paper is the implementation of a solution for virtualizing the services on the SGi-LAN using NFV and SDN.
The virtualized services include TCP optimization, video optimization and network analytics. In addition, a performance evaluation is presented with focus on key indicators for virtualization. It is shown that virtualizing network functions on servers using NFV adds an overhead of 20-40 µ seconds in latency per hop, but that the impact on the network function performance is negligible. It is also shown that a COTS server can support a single instance of the SDN controller programming 100K OpenFlow transactions/second and that a software switch can implement 100K rules/sec while forwarding traffic at 160Gbps with 200M rules. To evaluate the scaling feature of NFV it is shown that the time to bring up a new virtual network function was between 90-120 seconds.
Wireless network operators often offer wireless broadband services by using different wireless technologies such as WiMAX, WiFi and HSPA. Each wireless technology often uses a separate and stand alone network architecture, and thus operations and management may easily become a complex and expensive task. In this paper we present the design and implementation of an all-IP heterogeneous network where the services provided are public and private wireless broadband access based on Fixed WiMAX, WiFi and HSPA. These basic services and combinations of these are further used to design different commercial products in the network. Radio coverage measurements are then performed for these technologies in interesting parts of the realized deployed network. The overall network implementation has been in successful operation for several months.
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