Information-centric network virtualization for QoS provisioning over software defined wireless networks

Abstract

The software defined network (SDN) has emerged as an efficient network technology capable of supporting the dynamic nature of network functions while lowering the operating costs through simplified hardware, software, and management. The SDN is an efficient implementing technique for network function virtualization, because SDN maximizes network utilization by decoupling the wireless network infrastructure from the service that it provide, so that differentiated services can share the same infrastructure. One the other hand, information-centric network technique can reduce duplicate transmissions for popular contents by adopting caching strategy and enabling mobile-users to access popular contents from caches of nearby network gateways. One of the main challenges of implementing SDN is how to transmit the time-sensitive multimedia data with the delay-bounded quality of service (QoS) guaranteed in SDN environments. To overcome these difficulties, we propose an information-centric wireless network virtualization technique, which integrates the wireless network virtualization with information-centric networking. We formulate this data transmission problem over virtualized information-centric wireless network as follows. The mobile-user requests the data-source from the network controller. Network controller finds this data-source (located at the end host or a cache), and sets up a data delivery path for the mobile-user. We apply the effective capacity theory to measure the delay-bounded QoS for time-sensitive multimedia data transmission. The data delivery path is established based on a flexible network architecture, which can maximize the effective capacity, for the delivered data. In the delivery process, the data can be copied and stored in a network node as the cache for other mobile-users requests, aiming at minimizing the average transmit power consumption over all mobile-users.