Software-Defined Networking Techniques to Improve Mobile Network Connectivity: Technical Review

The proliferation of smart phones increases the demand for better Quality of Services (QoS) in mobile Internet. User's expectation causes the traditional design of mobile and wireless networks is not capable of keeping up with the changes from voice-centric to multimedia oriented services. Moreover, the mobile hosts require a certain protocol, such as mobile Internet Protocol (IP), that allows them to change their location and maintain data rate. It is important to note that mobile IP comes with handoff and routing issues that impose heavy load on home agent, which results in wasting resources. These issues and problems can be tackled and solved by using a dynamic and flexible architecture such as software-defined networking (SDN). SDN has become a common architecture to decouple conventional network architecture into control and data plane resulting in a direct programmable network control regardless the applications and network services used. In SDN architecture, a software-based controller is used to manage the forwarding rules of the switches under its supervision. The switches process the forwarding data based on the rules that are set by the controller. In recent years, OpenFlow protocol is widely utilized to standardize the communication between controllers and switches in SDN architecture. The uniqueness of SDN has gained high attention among researchers concerning enhancing the QoS in mobile network. This paper reviews the most recent SDN techniques proposed to improve mobile network and its performance.