SoftCell: scalable and flexible cellular core network architecture

By Xin Jin, Erran L. Li, Laurent Vanbever, Jennifer Rexford. Conference on Emerging Network Experiment and Technology, 2013

395 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Cellular core networks suffer from inflexible and expensive equipment, as well as from complex control-plane protocols. To address these challenges, we present SoftCell, a scalable architecture that supports fine-grained policies for mobile devices in cellular core networks, using commodity switches and servers. SoftCell enables operators to realize high-level service policies that direct traffic through sequences of middleboxes based on subscriber attributes and applications. To minimize the size of the forwarding tables, SoftCell aggregates traffic along multiple dimensions---the service policy, the base station, and the mobile device---at different switches in the network. Since most traffic originates from mobile devices, SoftCell performs fine-grained packet classification at the access switches, next to the base stations, where software switches can easily handle the state and bandwidth requirements. SoftCell guarantees that packets belonging to the same connection traverse the same sequence of middleboxes in both directions, even in the presence of mobility. We demonstrate that SoftCell improves the scalability and flexibility of cellular core networks by analyzing real LTE workloads, performing micro-benchmarks on our prototype controller as well as large-scale simulations.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/88c52b1ef876baf0eadfbd4aa792e8e3b861564f

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In Computer Networks and Communications

Citations in the corpus

5G roadmap: 10 key enabling technologies (2016, background): “In the literature, several studies [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [29] [30] [31] [32] have explored integrating SDN with 5G network from academic and/or industrial perspectives.”
Cloud RAN for Mobile Networks—A Technology Overview (2015, methodology): “While SDN has been widely adopted for core network, e.g. [107], Gudipati et al. in [108] propose a Software Deﬁned centralized control plane for Radio Access Network (SoftRAN).”
Resource Slicing in Virtual Wireless Networks: A Survey (2016, background): “In the cellular domain, SoftCell [13] focuses on the core network of cellular providers.”
Software-Defined Network Function Virtualization: A Survey (2015, background): “be fulfilled by packet-processing rules installed directly in the switches [105], [108], [110].”
On Multi-Access Edge Computing: A Survey of the Emerging 5G Network Edge Cloud Architecture and Orchestration (2017, neutral): “Asurveythat presents the main ideas behind SDN in mobile networks, focusing on network programmability, efﬁ-cient resource sharing and near real-time network control, is elaborated in [102] and [103].”
A Survey of Security in Software Defined Networks (2016, methodology): “With SoftCell [17], the authors use local software agents to cache packet classifiers and policy tags so that the main controller load is reduced.”