An architecture for the 5G control plane based on SDN and data distribution service

Abstract

The tremendous growth of services and costumers' demands have rendered traditional networks inefficient. Telecommunication operators need a more flexible, scalable, faster and programmable architecture to offer users these new services. Software Defined Networking (SDN) has emerged as a natural solution to this situation as it enables network programmability. This paper provides a review of the SDN architectures applied to fifth generation (5G) networks. In this work, the prime focus is a proposal of the control plane for a 5G architecture with a hybrid hierarchical set of controllers. The architecture is based on a federation of multiple sub-network controllers, each managing only a section of the network, conveniently coordinated by a hierarchically-superior controller. The use of Data Distribution Service (DDS) as a standard of the Object Management Group (OMG) is explored to improve the performance of the proposed architecture. DDS is used taking into account empirical results which have demonstrated a significant improvement in the performance compared to other existing solutions that do not use DDS. We illustrate the flexibility of our approach by presenting some use cases describing how the different elements of this architecture work.