Abstract
Next generation cellular applications and smart phone usage generate very heavy wireless data traffic. It becomes ineluctable for mobile network operators to have multiple core network entities such as Serving Gateway and Packet Data Network Gateway in 4G-LTE to share this high traffic generated. A typical configuration consists of multiple serving gateways behind a load-balancer which would determine which serving gateway would service a end-users'request. Such hardware is expensive, has a rigid policy set, and is a single point of failure. Another perspective of today's increasingly high data traffic is that besides it is being widely accepted that the high bandwidth L TE provides is creating bottlenecks for service providers by the increasing user bandwidth demands without creating any corresponding revenue improvements, a hidden problem that is also passively advancing on the newly emerging 4G-LTE that may need more immediate attention is the network signaling traffic, also known as the control-plane traffic that is generated by the applications developed for smartphones and tablets. With this as starting point, in this paper, we propose a solution, by a new approach considering OpenFlow switch connected to a controller, which gains flexibility in policy, costs less, and has the potential to be more robust to failure with future generations of switches. This also solves the problem of scaling the control-plane traffic that is imperative to preserve revenue and ensure customer satisfaction. Thus, with the proposed architecture with OpenFlow, mobile network operators could manipulate the traffic generated by the control-plane signaling separated from the data-plane, besides also reducing the cost in installing multiple core-network entities.