Velox: Next-Generation Industrial Cellular Networks With Programmable Data Planes

Abstract

Many new application domains for cellular net-works have emerged as the fifth-generation (5G) rollout widens worldwide. One use case is deploying next-generation cellular technology within industrial networks, which traditionally rely on wired communication technologies as it requires significantly lower latency and higher reliability. As the next-generation cellular systems can achieve such requirements and have lower capital expenditures and operational expenses, industries have started investing in the deployment of cellular networks. However, today's cellular networks lack the possible optimizations for private networks as many of them are publicly operated by a few mobile network operators. With this in mind, this paper introduces Velox, a novel system for next-generation cellular networks with programmable data planes, extending our pre-liminary work that targets the data plane latency and reliability goals of industrial 5G networks. We design Velox as a Software-Defined Network architecture on the switches connecting the base stations to the private cellular core network to monitor and modify packets at the line speed. We present a novel layer 2 (L2) protocol within Velox to achieve real-time network management, namely Unified Control Plane (UCP). Velox adapts the link-state routing protocol for switches distributing network information such as connected base stations and user equipment (UE). We develop a software emulator and simulator platform for Velox to evaluate it on both small and large scale networks. Our evaluation results indicate an average latency reduction of 40 % on the large-scaled networks. We demonstrate that Velox can distribute the connected UE information in less than a second.