Interference management in software-defined mobile networks

Software-Defined Networking promises to deliver more flexible and manageable networks by providing a clear decoupling between control plane and data plane and by implementing the latter in a logically centralized controller. However, if such principles are to be applied also to wireless networks, new primitives and abstractions capable of providing programmers with a global view of the network capturing channel quality and interference must be devised. Moreover, the dynamic radio environment necessitates fast adaptation of physical parameters such as power, modulation and coding schemes. So the wireless SDN abstractions should allow for such adaptations to happen closer to the air interface. In this paper, we present high level abstractions for channel quality, interference and network reconfiguration; the latter permits operations differing in timescales to be carried out at different controller entities. The proposed concepts have been implemented and evaluated over a WiFi-based WLAN. Empirical measurements show that the proposed platform can be used to implement typical WiFi network management tasks such as channel assignment and interference monitoring.