SoftCell: scalable and flexible cellular core network architecture
SoftCell: scalable and flexible cellular core network architecture
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DOI：
10.1145/2535372.2535377
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发表时间：
2013-12
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Xin Jin;Erran L. Li;Laurent Vanbever;J. Rexford
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Xin Jin;Erran L. Li;Laurent Vanbever;J. Rexford
蜂窝核心网络受到不灵活且昂贵的设备以及复杂的控制平面协议的影响。为了应对这些挑战，我们提出了SoftCell，一个可扩展的架构，支持细粒度的政策，移动的设备在蜂窝核心网络，使用商品交换机和服务器。SoftCell使运营商能够实现高级别的服务策略，根据用户属性和应用程序通过中间盒序列引导流量。为了最小化转发表的大小，SoftCell在网络中的不同交换机上沿着多个维度（服务策略、基站和移动终端）聚合流量。由于大多数流量源自移动的设备，SoftCell在基站旁边的接入交换机上执行细粒度的数据包分类，其中软件交换机可以轻松处理状态和带宽要求。SoftCell保证属于同一连接的数据包在两个方向上穿过相同的中间盒序列，即使在存在移动性的情况下也是如此。通过分析真实的LTE工作负载、在原型控制器上进行微基准测试以及大规模仿真，我们证明了SoftCell提高了蜂窝核心网络的可扩展性和灵活性。
Cellular core networks suffer from inflexible and expensive equipment, as well as from complex control-plane protocols. To address these challenges, we present SoftCell, a scalable architecture that supports fine-grained policies for mobile devices in cellular core networks, using commodity switches and servers. SoftCell enables operators to realize high-level service policies that direct traffic through sequences of middleboxes based on subscriber attributes and applications. To minimize the size of the forwarding tables, SoftCell aggregates traffic along multiple dimensions---the service policy, the base station, and the mobile device---at different switches in the network. Since most traffic originates from mobile devices, SoftCell performs fine-grained packet classification at the access switches, next to the base stations, where software switches can easily handle the state and bandwidth requirements. SoftCell guarantees that packets belonging to the same connection traverse the same sequence of middleboxes in both directions, even in the presence of mobility. We demonstrate that SoftCell improves the scalability and flexibility of cellular core networks by analyzing real LTE workloads, performing micro-benchmarks on our prototype controller as well as large-scale simulations.