Research Area: Software Defined Networks
The huge appreciation received by the Software Defined Networking (SDN), Network Functions Virtualization, and Cloud Computing in latest years pushed researchers, vendors, and mobile network operators to investigate the possibility of innovative design that integrates these technologies in cellular network aiming to overcome the limitations posed by currently deployed mobile networks and cope with the increasing demands of mobile customers.
This thesis describes an experimental investigation, design, implementation and evaluation of three different solutions to integrate SDN with mobile network. The first two approaches exploit the evolution of SDN where the control plane of the current LTE entities like the Mobility Management Entity, Serving Gateway and Packet Data Network Gateway are running as packages in an SDN controller or as VMs running in a cloud environment, while the data plane entities are represented by Openflow switches and eNodeBs.
The third approach uses SDN as an add-on to the backhaul of the existing cellular network to introduce variety of new services, selective traffic offloading to cloud-based infrastructure is used to demonstrate the advantage and disadvantage of different solution to implement this approach. Whereas all the proposed solutions have been proven to provide enhancement to the system performance. The first solution shows that utilizing SDN helps to reduce the signalling load, provides faster recovery time and better resource utilization.
Name of the Researcher: Salih, Mukhald
Name of the Supervisor(s): Cosmas, J
Year of Completion: 2019
University: Brunel University London
Thesis Link: Home Page Url
