Toward Information-Centric Software-Defined Cellular Networks

The concept of software-defined networking (SDN) is able to offer important advantages over the traditional communication paradigms. This is achieved by decoupling the decision-making process from the underlying network infrastructure that forwards the traffic. Recently, there have been efforts in applying the SDN approach to wireless and cellular networks. In fact, SDN is considered as one of the key enablers for future 5G communication networks. Information-centric networking (ICN) is another emerging communication paradigm that has been proposed to improve the content delivery efficiency compared to the traditional host-centric communication protocols. ICN decouples the data from their location, application, and means of transportation. This feature makes ICN particularly suitable for efficient dissemination of large volumes of data, especially in highly dynamic and heterogeneous mobile environments. In this work, we consider an SDN-enabled cellular network and propose an ICN protocol to ensure fast and efficient content dissemination to mobile users. The proposed protocol has been evaluated by means of computer simulations for the use case of a live video streaming service. Our experimental results show significant improvements in terms of response times over the current long-term evolution (LTE) networks.