Traffic Engineering for Software-Defined Radio Access Networks

We consider central traffic engineering in a software-defined radio access network (SD-RAN) consisting of routers, wireless access nodes, and wired/wireless links. We present a multi-path traffic engineering formulation for downlink transmission considering both backhaul and wireless access constraints. We show large throughput and quality of experience (QoE) gains over traditional single-path transmission. In order to increase robustness against unpredicted changes in the radio access network, we propose using link buffer status as feedback to traffic engineering and present a heuristic method for traffic engineering to adjust flow allocations according to buffer status observation.