Software Defined Mobile Networks (SDMN)

12Software Defined Networks for Mobile Application Services

Ram Gopal Lakshmi Narayanan

Verizon, San Jose, CAU, SA

12.1 Overview

Cloud, virtualization, and software defined networking (SDN) are emerging IT technologies, which revolutionizes business model and technical realization. Enterprise and network operators are consolidating their network and data center resources using virtualization technologies into service architecture. First, it is better to understand essential requirements that are driving these technologies so that we can realize how these technologies are achieving the end goals. The driving requirements are:

• Virtualization: Implement network function in software, and decouple the hardware dependency. Then run the network functions anywhere without the need to know physical location and how it is organized.
• Programmability: Topology should be flexible and able to change the behavior of the network on demand.
• Orchestration: Ability to manage and control different devices and software uniformly with simple and fewer operations.
• Scaling: System should be scalable up or down based on the usage of the network.
• Automation: System should provide automatic operations to lower operational expense. It must support troubleshooting, reduced downtime, easy life cycle management of infrastructure resource, and load usage.
• Performance: System must provide features to understand the network insights and take actions to optimize network device utilization such as capacity optimization, ...