The Wireless Control Plane: An Overview and Directions for Future Research

TL;DR

This paper reviews wireless control plane designs in 5G SDN networks, discusses their limitations, and proposes a DRL-based framework to enhance robustness and guide future research directions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of WCP schemes in 5G SDN, analyzes their design challenges, and introduces a novel DRL-based framework for improved control plane robustness.

Findings

Analysis of direct and indirect WCP schemes in 5G networks

Identification of design limitations in current WCP implementations

Proposal of a DRL-based framework for future WCP development

Abstract

Software-defined networking (SDN), which has been successfully deployed in the management of complex data centers, has recently been incorporated into a myriad of 5G networks to intelligently manage a wide range of heterogeneous wireless devices, software systems, and wireless access technologies. Thus, the SDN control plane needs to communicate wirelessly with the wireless data plane either directly or indirectly. The uncertainties in the wireless SDN control plane (WCP) make its design challenging. Both WCP schemes (direct WCP, D-WCP, and indirect WCP, I-WCP) have been incorporated into recent 5G networks; however, a discussion of their design principles and their design limitations is missing. This paper introduces an overview of the WCP design (I-WCP and D-WCP) and discusses its intricacies by reviewing its deployment in recent 5G networks. Furthermore, to facilitate synthesizing a robust WCP, this paper proposes a generic WCP framework using deep reinforcement learning (DRL) principles and presents a roadmap for future research.