Enabling Software-Defined Networking Technologies in Carrier Networks
Junyu Lai, Bing He, Guolin Sun, Gun Li, Kaiyu Qin · 2014
Adopting software-defined networking (SDN) in carrier networks is now gaining momentum. Carriers and vendors are rushing into this new domain, hoping to solve some most urgent problems which arise along with the process when fixed high-speed data access and mobile broadband (MBB) get increasingly popular across the globe. To the same end, this paper elaborates novel software-defined fixed networking (SDFN) and software-defined mobile networking (SDMN) architectures, leveraging a set of emerging and promising technologies including SDN, clouding computing, network virtualization (NV), network functions virtualization (NFV), and dynamic service chaining. Furthermore, in the light of the irreversible trend towards fixed mobile convergence (FMC), this paper also proposes a forward-looking software-defined converged networking (SDCN) architecture. The three proposed architectures can effectively help carriers to reduce cost and enhance service performance, and therefore can serve as a good reference for the next-generation carrier network designing.