Description

To cope with the growing traffic demand, future mobile networks will be denser and integrate heterogeneous technologies. However, if not properly engineered, such networks may incur in huge energy wastage when there is little traffic, and may suffer from an unbearable management burden caused by the variety of technologies integrated. In this paper, we propose and implement a novel management architecture for mobile networks based on OpenFlow, which supports resource-on-demand provisioning in a centralised control plane, and hides the technology specifics to the controller through the use of abstractions. The feasibility of the approach is demonstrated by a real-life prototype based on commercial, off-the-shelf devices.