Software Defined Networking and Tunneling for Mobile Networks

Abstract: With the deployment of Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks, mobile networks will become an important infrastructure component in the cloud ecosystem.  However, in the cloud computing era, traditional routing and switching platforms do not meet the requirements of this new trend, especially in a mobile network environment. With the recent advances in software switches and efficient virtualization using commodity servers, Software Defined Networking (SDN) has emerged as a powerful technology to meet the new requirements for supporting a new generation of cloud service. This thesis describers an experimental investigation of cloud computing, SDN, and a mobile network’s packet core. The design of a mobile network exploiting the evolution of SDN is also presented. The actual implementation consists of a GTP enabled Open vSwitch together with the transparent mode of mobile network SDN evolution. Open vSwitch is a SDN product designed for computer networks. The implementation extends Open vSwitch with an implementation of the GTP protocol. This extension enables Open vSwitch to be an excellent SDN component for mobile networks. In transparent mode, a cloud data center is deployed without making any modification to the existing mobile networks.  In the practical evaluation of the GTP-U tunnel protocol implementation, the measured metrics are UDP and TCP throughput, end-to-end latency and jitter.  Two experiments have been conducted and described in the evaluation chapter. Cloud computing has become one of the hottest Internet topics. It is attractive for the mobile network to adopt cloud computing technology in order to enjoy the benefits of cloud computing. For example, to reduce network construction cost, make the network deployment more flexible, etc. This thesis presents an potential direction for mobile network cloud computing. Since this thesis relies on open source projects, readers may use the results to explore a feasible direction for mobile network cloud computing evolution.