A three-tier SDN architecture for DenseNets

Traffic demand in terms of total traffic volume and bit rate of mobile users is expected to increase exponentially over the coming years. As a result, current cellular networks are rapidly reaching their capacity limitations. Rescaling existing networks and protocols will not solve the problem due to a number of reasons. Firstly, the cost of upgrading backhaul networks is very high. Secondly, the bottleneck is moving from the Radio Access Network (RAN) to the core network. Finally, difficulty of mobility management and operational cost are becoming very high. Therefore, a recent direction in research has been to deploy high dense heterogeneous networks called DenseNets. In this paper, a novel three-tiered Software Defined Networking (SDN) architecture is proposed to support heterogeneous DenseNets. SDN architecture with the proposed 3-tiers, identified as physical, control and management layers, is capable of tackling the aforementioned problems, as well as mitigating network bottlenecks, latency and interference.