A SDN Controller Enabled Architecture for the IMS

Abstract

As the essential technology to realize the open business communication network, the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is a necessary condition to enhance the mobile internet experience of users. However, with the continuous progress of communication technology, the existing architecture of the IMS has been unable to meet the needs of business development. To better solve these problems, we introduce the concept of Software Defined Network (SDN). SDN is a logically centralized control network architecture. One of SDN mechanisms is OpenFlow, and it is responsible for managing the network resources by using the remote SDN Controller. We argue for network slicing as an efficient solution that reasonably allocates resources by splitting a single physical infrastructure into multiple network resources for various users. Moreover, the SDN architecture provides tools to support network slicing. In this article, we propose and construct a combined architecture model that performs flow processing using the SDN architecture and OpenFlow via the IMS based signaling platform. It not only makes full use of the remote controller to dynamically manage network resources but also supports network slicing through the SDN architecture, which satisfies the broad service requirements of mobile networks. Besides, based on the proposed architecture, we carried out some tentative experiments and described them in detail.