Enabling Resource Pooling in Wireless Networks through Software-Defined Orchestration

This paper proposes a network paradigm where network resources are virtually pooled through an OpenFlow controller that serves as the network orchestrator. The benefits that our proposal may guarantee with respect to the solutions currently published in literature are the installation, configuration and implementation simplicity, strong expandability properties, fallback behavior if needed, resilience to link failures, improvement of uplink data rates in addition to the downlink and, last but not least, the compatibility with common equipment, as no ad-hoc network protocols are needed. To assess the performance of our proposal, we present the test bed that has been built and used to extract the emulation results. Depending on the network characteristics, it is shown how an efficient orchestrator may succeed in allowing users to efficiently exploit the available network resources. We also show how, even in the worst-cases, the proposal exhibits significant performance improvements with respect to transfers where resources are not pooled among hosts.