Software Defined Mobile Networks (SDMN)

Foreword

Originally, the Internet was designed as a decentralized packet switching network that is multiply redundant, fault-tolerant and with mostly peripheral computational components. Today, the Internet has usurped the majority of all information and communications technology (ICT) functions in society, spanning the range of media access services such as television, music and video streaming, Web access, and interactive telecommunications (voice and video telephony), as well as supporting a diverse range of applications that connect machine devices in various environments to each other and to the network. In parallel, the relentless reduction in price, power consumption, and device size driven by Moore’s law has led to computation, storage, and networking becoming so inexpensive that intelligence can be incorporated into almost all manufactured goods. Enterprise IT systems are also rapidly being centralized with cloud technologies, creating huge efficiencies in the way computation, networking, and storage are provisioned and deployed. The broad impact that the Internet and inexpensive computation are having on life is leading to a networked society, in which anything that would benefit from being connected, will be connected.

Central among the supporting technologies for a networked society are mobile networks which provide connectivity both for the devices that constitute the Internet of Things, as well as for devices used for communication by people. Mobile networks face ...