Virtual Cognitive Base Station: Enhancing Software-based Virtual Router Architecture with Cognitive Radio

AMPHIBIA is a framework which enables dynamic virtual network provisioning over wired and wireless networks for providing diverse services by coordinated reconfiguration in both sides of wired and wireless networks, exploiting the emerging network virtualization and cognitive radio technologies. AMPHIBIA introduces a new concept of a virtual cognitive base station (vCBS), a cognitive base station built on the virtualized infrastructure. The target applications of AMPHIBIA include flexible and rapid deployment of mobile services, end-to-end QoS, efficient wireless and wired resource utilization, and green networking. In prior work, we proposed a basic framework design of AMPHIBIA and a service model. In this paper, we show the implementation and prototype system of AMPHIBIA including the implementation of a cognitive virtualization manager (CVM), which is responsible for coordinated reconfiguration. We implement the AMPHIBIA prototype as an extension of CoreLab, a flexible software-based virtual router platform. Specifically, we develop vCBS by incorporating cognitive radio functionalities into a CoreLab virtual machine (VM). We also implement CVM and a reconfiguration manager of cognitive radio as external entities to enhance CoreLab. We confirm the basic behavior of the prototype and demonstrate with a set of simple typical scenarios that a VM-based virtual network including vCBS can be dynamically created, expanded, and deleted, and mobile streaming services can be flexibly deployed on the virtual network on an on-demand basis. We also demonstrate that AMPHIBIA can create and reconfigure a vCBS in about 51 seconds, and can timely operate the successive handover of a mobile terminal.