Intelligent content delivery over wireless via SDN
Hyunwoo Nam, Doru Calin, Henning G. Schulzrinne · 2015
On the Internet, most traffic is generated by content delivery applications such as video streaming, P2P and web surfing. With the proliferation of mobile applications that offer on-demand access to services, the ability to track end-user's perceived service quality has become a pivotal aspect for future networks such as 5G. Software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) in the mobile core offer unprecedented flexibility for opportunistic traffic steering, leading to advanced levels of quality-of-service (QoS) control. We leverage the SDN concept to dynamically control network traffic over wide area networks (WANs) from edge nodes of wireless networks (e.g., a packet data network gateway in LTE), depending on changing network conditions and application types. Our SDN-based application-aware routing system allows mobile network operators to achieve better utilization of their networks, service providers to improve customer satisfaction, and end-users to experience desirable service quality for various network applications. As for a prototype, we attach 802.11g to Mininet's virtual networks in order to show the feasibility of our approach.