Blueprint for introducing innovation into wireless mobile networks

Abstract

In the past couple of years we've seen quite a change in the wireless industry: Handsets have become mobile computers running user-contributed applications on (potentially) open operating systems. It seems we are on a path towards a more open ecosystem; one that has been previously closed and proprietary. The biggest winners are the users, who will have more choice among competing, innovative ideas.The same cannot be said for the wireless network infrastructure, which remains closed and (mostly) proprietary, and where innovation is bogged down by a glacial standards process. Yet as users, we are surrounded by abundant wireless capacity and multiple wireless networks (WiFi and cellular), with most of the capacity off-limits to us. It seems industry has little incentive to change, preferring to hold onto control as long as possible, keeping an inefficient and closed system in place.This paper is a "call to arms" to the research community to help move the network forward on a path to greater openness. We envision a world in which users can move freely between any wireless infrastructure, while providing payment to infrastructure owners, encouraging continued investment. We think the best path to get there is to separate the network service from the underlying physical infrastructure, and allow rapid innovation of network services, contributed by researchers, network operators, equipment vendors and third party developers.We propose to build and deploy an open-but backward compatible-wireless network infrastructure that can be easily deployed on college campuses worldwide. Through virtualization, we allow researchers to experiment with new network services directly in their production network.

Evolution Toward 5G Mobile Networks – A Survey on Enabling Technologies

“…A well-accepted southbound interface is OpenFlow. OpenFlow is a protocol that provides a way to communicate the controller with data paths using match-action rules [96]. When a packet arrives at a data path switch, its packet header is first matched with a flow entry in a flow table resided in each data path switch, and a corresponding action is taken on the packet following OpenFlow specifications for match-action rules such as …”

SDN in the wireless context - Towards full programmability of wireless network elements

“…One of the pioneering papers on making wireless networks software defined in accordance with OpenFlow specification was presented by Yap et al in [4]. OpenFlow Wireless builds on top of OpenFlow and serves to separate control and data, decouples mobility from the physical network, and is able to slice/virtualize the network using FlowVisor.…”

“…In principle, it proposes for design of future network architectures be based on the following principles [1], [2], [3], [4] The aim of this paper is to first introduce Software Defined Wireless Network (SDWN) as a guide for further research that will be done in the wireless domain. Second, to present a logical flow of describing the need for flexible, software based wireless networks, challenges and benefits as well as an architecture for implementation.…”

How Far Can We Go? Towards Realistic Software-Defined Wireless Networking Experiments

“…IEEE 802.11x standards are present in almost any portable devices and allow rolling out wireless infrastructures based on access point devices at a relative low cost. While the IEEE 802.11x standards keep steadily evolving, there are still many structural barriers to openness that prevent the wireless infrastructure to adapt, be customized, allow for differentiation, and leverage all wireless capacity around us as consequence of being an infrastructure closed to innovation [1].…”

“…To assess our claims of Mininet-WiFi delivering a sweet spot for realistic and reproducible SDWN experimentation, we reproduce related work experiments, we present a novel use case based on SSID-based forwarding, and we carry extensive evaluation work to validate the propagation models with traces and results from the R2lab testbed. 1 We also present the ability of replaying network conditions from the real world by taking into account observed variations in terms of bandwidth, latency, and packet loss.…”