Abstract
Future mobile data traffic predictions expect a significant increase in user data traffic, requiring new forms of mobile network infrastructures. Fifth generation (5G) communication standards propose the densification of small cell access base stations (BSs) in order to provide multigigabit and low latency connectivity. This densification requires a high capacity backhaul network. Using optical links to connect all the small cells is economically not feasible for large scale radio access networks where multiple BSs are deployed. A wireless backhaul formed by a mesh of millimeter-wave (mmWave) links is an attractive mobile backhaul solution, as flexible wireless (multihop) paths can be formed to interconnect all the access BSs. Moreover, a wireless backhaul allows the dynamic reconfiguration of the backhaul topology to match varying traffic demands or adaptively power on/off small cells for green backhaul operation. However, conducting and precisely controlling reconfiguration experiments over real mmWave multihop networks is a challenging task. In this paper, we develop a Software-Defined Networking (SDN) based approach to enable such a dynamic backhaul reconfiguration and use real-world mmWave equipment to setup a SDN-enabled mmWave testbed to conduct various reconfiguration experiments. In our approach, the SDN control plane is not only responsible for configuring the forwarding plane but also for the link configuration, antenna alignment, and adaptive mesh node power on/off operations. We implement the SDN-based reconfiguration operations in a testbed with four nodes, each equipped with multiple mmWave interfaces that can be mechanically steered to connect to different neighbors. We evaluate the impact of various reconfiguration operations on existing user traffic using a set of extensive testbed measurements. Moreover, we measure the impact of the channel assignment on existing traffic, showing that a setup with an optimal channel assignment between the mesh links can result in a 44% throughput increase, when compared to a suboptimal configuration.
Highlights
By 2021, mobile data traffic is predicted to grow to 49 exabytes per month, a sevenfold increase over 2016 [1]
To configure a mmWave link, the Small Cell Agent (SCA) orchestrates a set of procedures that (1) detach the involved interface from the Open vSwitch (OVS) bridge
We present the SOCRA architecture, which uses the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) control plane to manage a small cell wireless multihop mesh backhaul network
Summary
By 2021, mobile data traffic is predicted to grow to 49 exabytes per month, a sevenfold increase over 2016 [1]. Due to the dynamic nature of mobile communication traffic caused by diverse traffic demands during different times of the day, user mobility, and/or temporary network failures (for example, caused by long lasting obstacle blockage in mmWave links), it is important to be able to dynamically reconfigure the backhaul, in order to maintain the connectivity and adapt backhaul capacity to traffic demands Such reconfiguration typically involves rerouting existing traffic to match new forwarding decisions and turning on more small cells to provide additional localized capacity on-demand. (i) A comprehensive overview on wireless backhaul testbeds and related reconfiguration use cases (ii) A detailed presentation of our designed SDN-based architecture for the wireless backhaul management (iii) A thorough description of our developed mesh network testbed with steerable mmWave interfaces and power control units, which are configurable through a SDN control plane (iv) A performance evaluation of the SDN-based reconfiguration of our testbed, focused on the quality of existing user traffic over different topology changes.
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