A Software-Defined mobile network architecture

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has gained momentum in recent years, in a bid to transform networking ecosystems. It has already been applied to data center networks and wide area networks, such as Google´s WAN. A software-defined approach is thus a reasonable candidate architecture for other highly dynamic environments such as future 5G mobile networks. This paper presents a two-level software-defined approach for the future 5G architecture at the network and radio access layer. At each level, a dedicated logical centralised controller and northbound/southbound Application Programming Interfaces are defined. Two cross-layer schemes are also introduced for interaction between controllers.