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

TL;DR

This paper proposes a scalable SDN-based architecture for unified control of multiple Radio Access Technologies in wireless networks, enhancing resource utilization, QoS, and enabling flexible application deployment.

Contribution

It introduces a novel SDN architecture for multi-RAT management, improving network performance and supporting network slicing and QoS guarantees.

Findings

Architecture is scalable and improves network performance.

Evaluation shows benefits over existing architectures.

Supports RAT-agnostic application deployment.

Abstract

Telecom operators are using a variety of Radio Access Technologies (RATs) for providing services to mobile subscribers. This development has emphasized the requirement for unified control and management of diverse RATs. Although multiple RATs co-exist within today's cellular networks, each RAT is controlled by a set of different entities. This may lead to suboptimal utilization of the overall network resources. In this article, we review various architectures for multi-RAT control proposed by both industry and academia. We also propose a novel SDN based network architecture for end-to-end control and management of diverse RATs. The architecture is scalable and provides a framework for improved network performance over the present day architecture and proposals in existing literature. Our architecture also provides a framework for deployment of applications in a RAT agnostic fashion. It facilitates network slicing and enables the provision of Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees to the end user. We have also developed an evaluation platform based on ns-3 to evaluate the performance offered by the architecture. Experimental results obtained using the platform demonstrate the benefits provided by our architecture.