Software Defined Mobile Networks (SDMN)

1Overview

Madhusanka Liyanage,¹ Mika Ylianttila,² and Andrei Gurtov³

¹ Centre for Wireless Communication, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland

² Centre for Internet Excellence, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland

³ Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT, Aalto University, Espoo, Finland

Future mobile network architectures need to evolve to cope with future demand for high bandwidth, a large and evolving set of services with new specific requirements, high-level security, low energy consumption, and optimal spectrum utilization. Specifically, the increasing number of mobile users and services will result in the increasing capacity requirements for the mobile network. On the other hand, it is expected that mobile data traffic will grow faster than the fixed Internet during the upcoming years. Thus, accommodating this expected traffic growth is an imminent requirement of future mobile networks.

In order to keep up with the traffic growth, mobile networks have not only to go through architecture processes to optimize the current resources but also to add new components/technologies that increase the capacity. However, mobile backhaul networks contain remarkably complex and inflexible devices. Although the interfaces of a cellular network are globally standardized, still most of these devices are vendor specific. Thus, mobile operators do not have flexibility to “mix and match” capabilities from different vendors. In another aspect, the standardization process for mobile ...