Abstract
A software-defined networking (SDN) architecture is capable of integrating all radio frequency and optical wireless small cell networks (e.g. fifth generation (5G), long-term evolution (LTE) femtocell, wireless fidelity (WiFi), light fidelity (LiFi)) in one network domain. This paper considers a SDN-enabled heterogeneous network (HetNet) comprised of LiFi, LTE femtocell and WiFi access points (APs). The HetNet control plane maintains the state of the network topology and wireless resources, which can support the development of intelligent service provisioning and efficient data communications in x generation (xG) wireless networks. The SDN applications use the network state to provide services in the data plane. However, when the state of network and wireless resources constantly changes, the SDN applications cannot provide reliable and guaranteed services to the wireless user equipments. This paper develops a queuing theoretic framework, which provides a performance evaluation for the SDN-enabled HetNet and applications convergence. A traffic engineering (TE) scheme is developed to support dynamic agnostic downlink flows routing to APs and differentiated granular services across the HetNet. Network and user centric policies are developed to make applications aware of network resource availability on the northbound and southbound interfaces of a SDN controller. Numerical models are introduced to study the impact of the computation and communication resources of northbound and southbound interfaces on the SDN-enabled HetNet scalability and the quality-of-service (QoS) guarantee of applications. Also, simulation scenarios are conducted to evaluate the performance of the TE scheme in provisioning effective and reliable services for subscribers.
Highlights
Visible light communication (VLC) systems and light fidelity (LiFi) attocellular networks have been technologically enhanced to support high data rate point-to-point (p2p) and multiuser wireless communications [1]
The traffic flows of Deterministic guaranteed service (DGS), delay-sensitive service (DSS), throughput sensitive service (TSS) and best effort service (BES) are generated with data rate at 64 kbps, 1−5 Mbps, 12−18 Mbps, 0.5 − 6 Mbps, respectively
Each time a random number of UDs are active in the network, there are 30 % DGS UDs, 25 % DSS UDs, 25 % TSS UDs and 20 % BES UDs are distributed across the heterogeneous network (HetNet)
Summary
Visible light communication (VLC) systems and light fidelity (LiFi) attocellular networks have been technologically enhanced to support high data rate point-to-point (p2p) and multiuser wireless communications [1]. When the number of deployed APs and active users increases in the network, it becomes more challenging for the control plane to apply fast forwarding rules and support concurrent applications access to the available resources in the data plane. One of the applications needs to retry again during the state collection time period to access the same resource in the forwarding plane To this end, the constant changes in the global state of the HetNet make it challenging for the SDN applications to provide consistent and ubiquitous services to their UEs in the data plane. A research challenge lies in developing user association to APs and agnostic traffic flow routing algorithms These should run on any AP, independent of its underlying wireless technology, while meeting the service requirements of user applications
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