Enabling Highly Dynamic Mobile Scenarios with Software Defined Networking

Abstract

Mobile devices have promoted users' mobility; therefore, there is a necessity to provide services that accomplish users' requirements at any place and time. With this, location becomes a key aspect of providing the dynamism required by solutions like the provisioning of reasonable mobile services by service provider networks. In that sense, the SDN paradigm arose to evolve from current static networks, which are manually configured by administrators, toward dynamic networks able to manage on their own at runtime and on demand. Solutions managing the SDN resources by using policies have been proposed, but they do not consider one of the main aspects to network dynamism: mobility. This article presents a mobility-aware and policy-based on-demand control network solution oriented to the SDN paradigm. This is in charge of managing, at runtime, the service and/or system state with high-level policies, which consider the mobility of users and services, the network statistics, and the infrastructure location. In this context, we define different use cases with the concerns of end users when they are in very crowded places, and the solutions provided by our solution through policies: balancing the network traffic between the infrastructure located close to the overloaded one; creating or dismantling geolocated virtual network infrastructure when the existing one is not enough, or is misused to meet end-user demands; and restricting specific network traffic in critical scenarios, like in sports events where crowds consume services with large bandwidth.