Software Defined Mobile Networks (SDMN)

19SDMNIndustry Architecture Evolution Paths

Nan Zhang, Tapio Levä, and Heikki Hämmäinen

Aalto University, Espoo, Finland

19.1 Introduction

Global mobile data traffic is expected to increase at a compound annual growth rate of 61% between 2013 and 2018 [1], which can make the current centralized gateway system a bottleneck. Software defined networking (SDN) [2] based on, for example, the OpenFlow protocol [3] is one suggested solution to dissolve this bottleneck by separating the network into centralized control functions and distributed forwarding switches.

Separating the control plane functions from the user plane elements creates more signaling traffic [4]. However, the network could also see cost savings [5, 6] from capacity sharing and economies of scale benefits from shared cloud platforms. In addition, acquiring and maintaining standardized general-purpose switches are assumed to be cheaper than the costs of proprietary specific-purpose components currently used in mobile networks [5]. Before the net benefit can be quantified, the industry architectures mapping the technical and business relationships between the network elements and the market actors need to be identified.

Industry architectures and business models for virtualized mobile networks are not an entirely new research topic. However, previous studies have typically focused only on one business model or use case. For example, Fischer et al. [7] describe a simple infrastructure-as-a-service business model, where ...