An innovative software-defined WiNeMO architecture for advanced QoS-guaranteed mobile service transport

The spread of wireless networks and the growing proliferation of mobile devices require the development of new mobility control mechanisms to support the different demands of traffic in different network conditions. A major obstacle to developing this kind of technology refers to the complexity involved in handling all the information about the large number of Moving Objects (MOs), as well as the total signaling overhead required to manage these procedures in the network. Several initiatives proposed by the scientific community to address this issue reveal weakness, particularly by relying on the MO for the responsibility in triggering the mobility process. Moreover, they are often only guided by wireless medium statistics, such as the Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) of the candidate Point of Attachment (PoA). Thus, this work seeks to develop, evaluate and validate a high-level communication infrastructure for Wireless Networking for Moving Objects (WiNeMO) systems by making use of the flexibility provided by the Software Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm, where network functions are easily and efficiently deployed by integrating OpenFlow and IEEE 802.21 standards. The Software-Defined WiNeMO (SDWiNeMO) holistic framework is largely aimed at enabling the network infrastructure to provision service transport while guaranteeing Quality of Service (QoS) for multiple mobile applications, as well as providing seamless mobility for MOs always seeking the best connectivity to maintain good Quality of Experience (QoE) over time. Moreover, SDWiNeMO deploys a new mobility-based load balancing technique to increase MO admissions for situations involving PoA resource saturation. The feasibility and effectiveness of our proposal is assessed by prototyping and evaluating the SDWiNeMO architecture in a baseline emulated testbed comprising realistic networking conditions. For purposes of benchmarking, the analysis was conducted in the control and data plane aspects, which demonstrate that the SDWiNeMO proposal significantly outperforms typical QoS-capable Internet Protocol (IP)-based SDN configurations by allowing the network to handle the multimedia traffic with optimal QoS-guaranteed transport and acceptable QoE over time.