Access Control for Software-Defined Heterogeneous Wireless Access Network

With the wide and prosperous application of wireless communication, it will cause new requirement to the network scalability and flexibility. However, in traditional heterogeneous wireless network architecture, the data plane and the control plane are tightly coupled, and it is very complicated to support flexible control strategy. The novel wireless network architecture based on Software-Defined Networking (SDN) can meet the demand, with the controller manage the whole access network, and by programming to it we can realize the control functions flexibly, such as access control function. Access control is very important decision making ensuring the user's Quality of Service (QoS), and a good access control algorithm should make improvement in Call blocking probability and drop probability. In this paper, a SDN-based heterogeneous network architecture with the cooperation of various access networks are proposed, and the access control method named Dynamic Reservation Channels for Handover Call (DCRHC) under this architecture is designed to decrease the blocking probability. Simulation results show the performance gain benefits.