Browsing by Author "Haile Magicho, Rekik"

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Application of SDN Concept in Mobile Backhaul for Traffic Optimization
(2014-12-15) Haile Magicho, Rekik
Sähkötekniikan korkeakoulu | Master's thesis
The proliferation of mobile broadband is driven by the evolution of radio technologies in the access network. The Mobile Backhaul (MBH) needs to evolve to avoid being the bottleneck for bandwidth hungry and delay sensitive data traffic. Internet Protocol (IP) based backhaul solutions offer differentiation based on Quality of Service (QoS) and Class of Service (CoS) and flexible bandwidth planning for the ever increasing data traffic. Additionally, Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) based transport protocols support mechanisms for co-existence of different generation technologies. Operator networks benefit from meticulously performed traffic engineering in the backhaul citing that it is very big portion of their network. They also need an efficient network architecture thus SDN is proposed as the new networking paradigm for MBH in this thesis. Legacy networks -which are often proprietary- mainly consist of purpose built hardware with Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs). ASIC-based hardware have high performance but exhibit low flexibility. These appliances stand in the way of the upgrade flexibility required by the network operators to facilitate speedy innovation and delivery of new services. Software-Defined Networking's (SDN's) decoupled control plane and forwarding plane architecture simplifies the forwarding plane by collecting intelligence in the controller. It offers a standardized interface realizing the desired programmability of the network elements. SDN encourages vendor agnostic standardized protocols to boost interoperability. The feasibility of SDN in MBH has been studied in this thesis. Moreover the scalability of the centralized controller has been analysed. This thesis is organized in literature review, practical software project and analysis.