Open Wireless Network Architecture in Radio Access Network

Abstract

Continuous evolution of wireless protocol and the increasing unmanaged deployment of small cells (e.g. Pico-cell, femto-cell or Wi-Fi APs) have raised an urgent need to update mobile network architecture. To support such evolvability, we design the Open Wireless Network (OWN), a novel evolved architecture for radio access networks, including UMTS, 802.11 WLAN, etc. The main contribution of this paper is that it separates radio access networks into control plane and data plane, and introduces a unified controller for different radio access networks. The data plane consists of soft base stations and access points (BS/AP). The LTE base station and Wi-Fi access point have been realized on our GPP-based platform. A cloud-based controller works as the control plane. In this paper, the OWN operating system (OWN OS) is designed for the controller to perform the corresponding control functions, and it provides open application interfaces (APIs) for developing customed network management applications. Our current system has already supported remote system configuration, QoE-oriented wireless resource management, mobility management and load balancing in heterogeneous networks, etc. We believe that OWN is a promising architecture to make the wireless network central controlled, QoE-oriented, feasible to evolve and more open to operators and vendors.