An evolvable, scalable, and resilient control channel for software defined wireless access networks

•We propose the novel multipath communication-based OpenFlow channel, namely mOpenFlow for Software Defined Wireless Access Networks (SDWANs).•mOpenFlow achieves robustness and scalability by leveraging the advantage of multipath communications.•mOpenFlow evolves seamlessly on the mix deployment of SDWANs and the OpenFlow standard by using the transport layer multipath solution (i.e., the standard multipath TCP).•mOpenFlow is newly modeled by a network calculus-based framework that provides a reliable tool for the channel 's performance analysis.

This paper presents a novel multipath communication-based OpenFlow channel for Software Defined Wireless Access Networks (SDWANs), namely mOpenFlow. The advantageous features of mOpenFlow include the following: (i) resilience and scalability in wireless environments, (ii) evolvability of the existing access networks and the OpenFlow standard, (iii) a novel network calculus-based model for performance analysis of mOpenFlow. By leveraging the multipath communication for conveying OpenFlow traffic, mOpenFlow enhances both robustness (i.e., resilience) and throughput (i.e., scalability) of the control channel. To achieve the evolvability, mOpenFlow adopts the multipath transport control protocol, which conforms to SDWANs and the OpenFlow standard. We evaluate mOpenFlow in an emulated SDWAN in relation to the standard channel. The results show that mOpenFlow outperforms the standard channel, both in terms of robustness and scalability. Additionally, the numerical results indicate that the model provides a fast and reliable way for analyzing the end-to-end delay on mOpenFlow.

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