Due to the rapid growth of mobile data traffic, more and more basestations and access points (APs) have been densely deployed to provide users with ubiquitous network access, which make current wireless network a complex heterogeneous network (HetNet). However, traditional wireless networks are designed with network-centric approaches where different networks have different quality of service (QoS) strategies and cannot easily cooperate with each other to serve network users. Massive network infrastructures could not assure users perceived network and service quality, which is an indisputable fact. To address this issue, we design a new framework for heterogeneous wireless networks with the principle of user-centricity, refactoring the network from users’ perspective to suffice their requirements and preferences. Different from network-centric approaches, the proposed framework takes advantage of Software Defined Networking (SDN) and virtualization technology, which will bring better perceived services quality for wireless network users. In the proposed user-centric framework, control plane and data plane are decoupled to manage the HetNets in a flexible and coadjutant way, and resource virtualization technology is introduced to abstract physical resources of HetNets into unified virtualized resources. Hence, ubiquitous and undifferentiated network connectivity and QoE (quality of experience) driven fine-grained resource management could be achieved for wireless network users.
SDN Based User-Centric Framework for Heterogeneous Wireless Networks