Cross-Layer Software-Defined 5G Network

In the past few decades, the world has witnessed a rapid growth in mobile communication and reaped great benefits from it. Even though the fourth generation (4G) mobile communication system is just being deployed worldwide, proliferating mobile demands call for newer wireless communication technologies with even better performance. Consequently, the fifth generation (5G) system is already emerging in the research field. However, simply evolving the current mobile networks can hardly meet such great expectations, because over the years the infrastructures have generally become ossified, closed, and vertically constructed. Aiming to establish a new paradigm for 5G mobile networks, in this article, we propose a cross-layer softwaredefined 5G network architecture. By jointly considering M. Yang · B. Li · Z. Yan School of Electronics and Information, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, 710072, People’s Republic of China M. Yang e-mail: [email protected] Y. Li ( ) · D. Jin Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, People’s Republic of China e-mail: [email protected] L. Hu School of Computer Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, 1037 Luoyu Rd, Hongshan, Wuhan, Hubei, China e-mail: [email protected] S. Chen Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK e-mail: [email protected] both the network layer and the physical layer together, we establish the two software-defined programmable components, the control plane and the cloud computing pool, which enable an effective control of the mobile network from the global perspective and benefit technological innovations. Specifically, by the cross-layer design for softwaredefining, the logically centralized and programmable control plane abstracts the control functions from the network layer down to the physical layer, through which we achieve the fine-grained controlling of mobile network, while the cloud computing pool provides powerful computing capability to implement the baseband data processing of multiple heterogeneous networks. The flexible programmability feature of our architecture makes it convenient to deploy crosslayer technological innovations and benefits the network evolution. We discuss the main challenges of our architecture, including the fine-grained control strategies, network virtualization, and programmability. The architecture significantly benefits the convergence towards heterogeneous networks and enables much more controllable, programmable and evolvable mobile networks. Simulations validate these performance advantages.