Software-Defined architecture for QoS-Aware IoT deployments in 5G systems

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT), a ubiquitous network of interconnected objects, harvests information from the environments, interacts with the physical world, and uses the existing Internet infrastructure to provide services for information transfer and emerging applications. However, the scalability and Internet access fundamentally challenge the realization of a wide range of IoT applications. Based on recent developments of 5G system architecture, namely SoftAir, this paper introduces a new software-defined platform that enables dynamic and flexible infrastructure for 5G IoT communication. A corresponding sum-rate analysis is also carried out via an optimization approach for efficient data transmissions. First, the SoftAir decouples control plane and data plane for a software-defined wireless architecture and enables effective coordination among remote radio heads (RRHs), equipped with millimeter-wave (mmWave) frontend, for IoT access. Next, by introducing an innovative design of software-defined gateways (SD-GWs) as local IoT controllers in SoftAir, the wide diversity of IoT applications and the heterogeneity of IoT devices are easily accommodated. These SD-GWs aggregate the traffic from heterogeneous IoT devices and perform protocol conversions between IoT networks and radio access networks. Moreover, a cross-domain optimization framework is proposed in this extended SoftAir architecture concerning both upstream and downstream communication, where the respective sum-rates are maximized and system-level constraints are guaranteed, including (i) quality-of-service requirements of IoT transmissions, (ii) total power limit of mmWave RRHs, and (iii) fronthaul network capacities. Simulation results validate the efficacy of our solutions, where the extended SoftAir solution surpasses existing IoT schemes in spectral efficiency and achieves optimal data rates for next-generation IoT communication.