Service-oriented cross-layer management for software-defined cellular networks

Rapid growing demand for mobile traffic and severe service bursts generated by various mobile applications are challenging the capacities and management of future cellular networks. The measurement data from real cellular networks indicate that the mobile Internet traffic expresses long-range dependence (LRD) characteristics, which differs from the traditional exponential assumption as well as 3GPP reports, would greatly deteriorate the experience of the subscribers. On the other hand, the mobile cellular networks treat most services without differentiation, although different services have their own requirements on transmission rates and delay. After introducing a new metric called the Quality of Experience (QoE) index for different services and analyzing the influence of LRD traffic, two approaches are proposed to alleviate the experience deterioration caused by traffic bursts: cloud based baseband resource pool to improve the flexibility of networks and wireless context-aware service controller to manage the distinctive QoE requirements of different services. Finally, simulations validate that these approaches not only contribute to service-oriented cross-layer optimization methods to satisfy the network resource constraints, but also provide a software-controlled service management framework for cellular networks.