SDRBench: A Software-Defined Radio Access Network Controller Benchmark

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has been identified as a key enabler for 5G networks to enhance the network capabilities by introducing flexibility and programmability. While SDN has been widely exploited in the core network side, it still remains an open research question in the Radio Access Network (RAN). Initial works highlight the benefits of SDN in RAN and investigate the idea of separating the control plane from the data plane of the Base Stations (BS) by means of SDN. The pioneer Software-Defined RAN (SD-RAN) controllers are available, nonetheless there exist no tools which can shed light on their performance and help to understand their limitations. We introduce SDRBench, a novel SD-RAN controller benchmark tool to fill this void. In this work, we evaluate FlexRAN, which is the first open source SD-RAN platform. In our tool, a Python-based instance of a FlexRAN agent is created and it communicates messages with the controller according to the FlexRAN protocol. The benchmark is used to uncover the limits of the SD-RAN controller.