Building programmable wireless networks: an architectural survey
- PDF / 1,623,524 Bytes
- 31 Pages / 595 x 794 pts Page_size
- 77 Downloads / 210 Views
R EVIEW
Open Access
Building programmable wireless networks: an architectural survey Junaid Qadir1* , Nadeem Ahmed1 and Nauman Ahad1,2 Abstract In recent times, there is increasing consensus that the traditional Internet architecture needs to be evolved for it to sustain unstinted growth and innovation. A major reason for the perceived architectural ossification is the lack of the ability to program the network as a system. This situation has resulted partly from historical decisions in the original Internet design which emphasized decentralized network operations through colocated data and control planes on each network device. The situation for wireless networks is no different resulting in a lot of complexity and a plethora of largely incompatible wireless technologies. With traditional architectures providing limited support for programmability, there is a broad realization in the wireless community that future programmable wireless networks would require significant architectural innovations. In this paper, we will present an unified overview of the programmability solutions that have been proposed at the device and the network level. In particular, we will discuss software-defined radio (SDR), cognitive radio (CR), programmable MAC processor, and programmable routers as device-level programmability solutions, and software-defined networking (SDN), cognitive wireless networking (CWN), virtualizable wireless networking (VWN) and cloud-based wireless networking (CbWN) as network-level programmability solutions. We provide both a self-contained exposition of these topics as well as a broad survey of the application of these trends in modern wireless networks. 1 Introduction Wireless networks have become increasingly popular due to the inherent convenience of untethered communication. They are deployed ubiquitously in myriad of networking environments ranging from cellular mobile networking, regional or city-wide networking (e.g., through worldwide interoperability for microwave access (WiMAX) technology), and local area or even personal networking environments (e.g., through Wi-Fi and Bluetooth technology, respectively) [1]. With the usage of wireless networks promising to increase in the future, both in demand and application diversity [2], the issue of devising and implementing flexible architectural support becomes all the more important. While newer wireless technologies have been emerging at a prolific rate, the architecture of wireless networking has largely been static and difficult to evolve. The malaise of architectural ‘ossification’ is not unique to *Correspondence: [email protected] 1 School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (SEECS), National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Islamabad 44000, Pakistan Full list of author information is available at the end of the article
wireless networking though but applies more generally to networking. Before we can describe the reasons of this ossification, we operationally define the data plane to be responsible for forwarding
Data Loading...
