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Software-Defined Networking Based Mobile Networks

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A special issue of Sensors (ISSN 1424-8220). This special issue belongs to the section "Sensor Networks".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 May 2018) | Viewed by 23713

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Special Issue Editors

Dr. Mianxiong Dong

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Guest Editor

Department of Sciences and Informatics, Muroran Institute of Technology, 27-1 Mizumoto-cho, Muroran 050-8585, Hokkaido, Japan
Interests: wireless networks; cloud computing; cyberphysical systems
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Prof. Dr. Jun Wu

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor

School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China
Interests: software-defined networks; mobile networks; cyber security; fog computing
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Mobile networks such as cellular core networks (CNs), radio access networks (RANs), and heterogeneous networks (HetNets) have changed our life significantly by enabling ubiquitous service access. However, as the volume and velocity of mobile data exchange sharply grows in emerging fields (like smart grid, industrial Internet of things, unmanned systems, etc.), mobile networks urge for more and more secure, robust, and efficient communication and computing resources, leading to the bottleneck in terms of data processing, link latency, and traffic overhead. Software-defined networking based mobile networks emerges as a novel paradigm that supports virtualized, multi-tenant, and context-aware network resources allocation, while embracing the decentralized principles (e.g. mobile edge computing, device-to-device, and blockchain). In particular, software-defined networking based mobile networks with the features (e.g., loose coupled, programmable, and capacity of processing large number of heterogeneous wireless access) to support global network visibility and controllability is an attractive solution to the superelevation density mobile applications. This architecture enables real-time function refactoring scheme by assigning up-to-state control strategies to underlying infrastructures. With the prospect of this new type of networks, many fundamental technical challenges arise regarding it for future applications.

The goal of this special issue is to highlight state of the art applications of software-defined networking based mobile networks. The topics of this special issue include (but not limited to): novel architectures and protocols, service discovery and content caching models, context-aware controller placement optimization, orchestration across computation, storage and communication resources, QoS/QoE-aware end-to-end routing selection, energy-aware load balancing and scheduling, security and privacy-preservation, 5G applications, big data applications, testing and evaluation tools of software-defined networking based mobile networks.

We invite you to submit original unpublished work on the listed or related topics.

Dr. Mianxiong Dong
Dr. Jun Wu
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

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Keywords

Software-defined networks
Mobile networks
5G
Big data
Mobile edge computing
Context-aware
QoS/QoE-aware
Energy-aware
Service discovery
Content caching
Security and privacy-preservation
Blockchain
Device-to-device
Heterogeneous wireless access
Network resources allocation
Smart grid
unmanned systems
Internet of things
Test-bed

Published Papers (6 papers)

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Research

20 pages, 520 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Duopoly Price Competition in Wireless Sensor Network-Based Service Provision

by Xianwei Li, Liang Zhao, Zhenyu Zhou, Bo Gu, Guolong Chen, Fanyong Cheng and Haiyang Zhang

Sensors 2018, 18(12), 4422; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/s18124422 - 14 Dec 2018

Cited by 3 | Viewed by 2782

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is emerging as a new communication paradigm and has attracted a significant amount of attention from both academic and engineering communities. In this paper, we consider an IoT market where three roles exist: Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), two service providers (SPs) and end users. The WSNs are responsible for sensing and providing data to the two SPs. Based on the sensed data from WSNs, the two SPs compete to provide services to the end users. We model the relationship between the two SPs and end users as a two-stage Stackelberg game, where the two SPs set the prices for their services firstly, and then the end users decide which SP to choose. Specifically, we consider two price-competition scenarios of the two SPs, which are engaged in two games, one is a noncooperative strategic game (NSG) where the two SPs set the prices for services simultaneously, the other is a Stackelberg game (SG) where SP1 who sets the price first is the leader and SP2 who sets the price after is the follower. Each user decides whether and which SP to purchase services from based on prices and service rates. An equilibrium is achieved in each of the two scenarios. Numerical results are conducted to verify our theoretical analysis. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Software-Defined Networking Based Mobile Networks)

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24 pages, 976 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Towards a Scalable Software Defined Network-on-Chip for Next Generation Cloud

by Alberto Scionti, Somnath Mazumdar and Antoni Portero

Sensors 2018, 18(7), 2330; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/s18072330 - 18 Jul 2018

Cited by 14 | Viewed by 3909

Abstract

The rapid evolution of Cloud-based services and the growing interest in deep learning (DL)-based applications is putting increasing pressure on hyperscalers and general purpose hardware designers to provide more efficient and scalable systems. Cloud-based infrastructures must consist of more energy efficient components. The evolution must take place from the core of the infrastructure (i.e., data centers (DCs)) to the edges (Edge computing) to adequately support new/future applications. Adaptability/elasticity is one of the features required to increase the performance-to-power ratios. Hardware-based mechanisms have been proposed to support system reconfiguration mostly at the processing elements level, while fewer studies have been carried out regarding scalable, modular interconnected sub-systems. In this paper, we propose a scalable Software Defined Network-on-Chip (SDNoC)-based architecture. Our solution can easily be adapted to support devices ranging from low-power computing nodes placed at the edge of the Cloud to high-performance many-core processors in the Cloud DCs, by leveraging on a modular design approach. The proposed design merges the benefits of hierarchical network-on-chip (NoC) topologies (via fusing the ring and the 2D-mesh topology), with those brought by dynamic reconfiguration (i.e., adaptation). Our proposed interconnect allows for creating different types of virtualised topologies aiming at serving different communication requirements and thus providing better resource partitioning (virtual tiles) for concurrent tasks. To further allow the software layer controlling and monitoring of the NoC subsystem, a few customised instructions supporting a data-driven program execution model (PXM) are added to the processing element’s instruction set architecture (ISA). In general, the data-driven programming and execution models are suitable for supporting the DL applications. We also introduce a mechanism to map a high-level programming language embedding concurrent execution models into the basic functionalities offered by our SDNoC for easing the programming of the proposed system. In the reported experiments, we compared our lightweight reconfigurable architecture to a conventional flattened 2D-mesh interconnection subsystem. Results show that our design provides an increment of the data traffic throughput of

9.5

% and a reduction of

2.2 \times

of the average packet latency, compared to the flattened 2D-mesh topology connecting the same number of processing elements (PEs) (up to 1024 cores). Similarly, power and resource (on FPGA devices) consumption is also low, confirming good scalability of the proposed architecture. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Software-Defined Networking Based Mobile Networks)

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24 pages, 895 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A Software-Defined Networking Framework to Provide Dynamic QoS Management in IEEE 802.11 Networks

by Pilar Manzanares-Lopez, Josemaria Malgosa-Sanahuja and Juan Pedro Muñoz-Gea

Sensors 2018, 18(7), 2247; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/s18072247 - 12 Jul 2018

Cited by 8 | Viewed by 3025

Abstract

In this paper, the concept of SDN (Software Defined Networking) is extended to be applied to wireless networks. Traditionally, in a wired SDN environment, the OpenFlow protocol is the communication protocol used to configure the flow table of forwarding elements (i.e., switches and Access Points). However, although in IEEE 802.11 networks there is no concept of forwarding, the SDN paradigm could also be applied to set up the wireless network dynamically, in order to improve the performance. In this case, not only the network elements, that is the Access Points, but also the mobile elements should configure their link and physical layers parameters following the guidelines of a centralized SDN controller. In particular, we propose a mechanism called DEDCA (Dynamic Enhanced Distributed Channel Access) to manage the channel access in wireless networks, and a framework that enables its implementation in 802.11-based wireless networks using SDN technology. The key aspect of this alternative solution is the control over the contention window size of the wireless terminals. Thus, an adequate response to dynamic and short-term Quality of Service (QoS) requirements can be offered to services running on these networks. DEDCA mechanism relies upon the use of a scalar parameter called gain. The mathematical model which has allowed us to obtain this parameter is presented and evaluated in this paper. Finally, the usefulness of the proposed solutions have been evaluated by means of their implementation in an example case. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Software-Defined Networking Based Mobile Networks)

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12 pages, 428 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Energy-Aware Computation Offloading of IoT Sensors in Cloudlet-Based Mobile Edge Computing

by Xiao Ma, Chuang Lin, Han Zhang and Jianwei Liu

Sensors 2018, 18(6), 1945; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/s18061945 - 15 Jun 2018

Cited by 36 | Viewed by 4153

Abstract

Mobile edge computing is proposed as a promising computing paradigm to relieve the excessive burden of data centers and mobile networks, which is induced by the rapid growth of Internet of Things (IoT). This work introduces the cloud-assisted multi-cloudlet framework to provision scalable services in cloudlet-based mobile edge computing. Due to the constrained computation resources of cloudlets and limited communication resources of wireless access points (APs), IoT sensors with identical computation offloading decisions interact with each other. To optimize the processing delay and energy consumption of computation tasks, theoretic analysis of the computation offloading decision problem of IoT sensors is presented in this paper. In more detail, the computation offloading decision problem of IoT sensors is formulated as a computation offloading game and the condition of Nash equilibrium is derived by introducing the tool of a potential game. By exploiting the finite improvement property of the game, the Computation Offloading Decision (COD) algorithm is designed to provide decentralized computation offloading strategies for IoT sensors. Simulation results demonstrate that the COD algorithm can significantly reduce the system cost compared with the random-selection algorithm and the cloud-first algorithm. Furthermore, the COD algorithm can scale well with increasing IoT sensors. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Software-Defined Networking Based Mobile Networks)

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19 pages, 1514 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A Convex Constraint Variational Method for Restoring Blurred Images in the Presence of Alpha-Stable Noises

by Zhenzhen Yang, Zhen Yang and Guan Gui

Sensors 2018, 18(4), 1175; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/s18041175 - 12 Apr 2018

Cited by 9 | Viewed by 3417

Abstract

Blurred image restoration poses a great challenge under the non-Gaussian noise environments in various communication systems. In order to restore images from blur and alpha-stable noise while also preserving their edges, this paper proposes a variational method to restore the blurred images with alpha-stable noises based on the property of the meridian distribution and the total variation (TV). Since the variational model is non-convex, it cannot guarantee a global optimal solution. To overcome this drawback, we also incorporate an additional penalty term into the deblurring and denoising model and propose a strictly convex variational method. Due to the convexity of our model, the primal-dual algorithm is adopted to solve this convex variational problem. Our simulation results validate the proposed method. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Software-Defined Networking Based Mobile Networks)

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2140 KiB

Open AccessArticle

SACFIR: SDN-Based Application-Aware Centralized Adaptive Flow Iterative Reconfiguring Routing Protocol for WSNs

by Muhammad Aslam, Xiaopeng Hu and Fan Wang

Sensors 2017, 17(12), 2893; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/s17122893 - 13 Dec 2017

Cited by 8 | Viewed by 5721

Abstract

Smart reconfiguration of a dynamic networking environment is offered by the central control of Software-Defined Networking (SDN). Centralized SDN-based management architectures are capable of retrieving global topology intelligence and decoupling the forwarding plane from the control plane. Routing protocols developed for conventional Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) utilize limited iterative reconfiguration methods to optimize environmental reporting. However, the challenging networking scenarios of WSNs involve a performance overhead due to constant periodic iterative reconfigurations. In this paper, we propose the SDN-based Application-aware Centralized adaptive Flow Iterative Reconfiguring (SACFIR) routing protocol with the centralized SDN iterative solver controller to maintain the load-balancing between flow reconfigurations and flow allocation cost. The proposed SACFIR’s routing protocol offers a unique iterative path-selection algorithm, which initially computes suitable clustering based on residual resources at the control layer and then implements application-aware threshold-based multi-hop report transmissions on the forwarding plane. The operation of the SACFIR algorithm is centrally supervised by the SDN controller residing at the Base Station (BS). This paper extends SACFIR to SDN-based Application-aware Main-value Centralized adaptive Flow Iterative Reconfiguring (SAMCFIR) to establish both proactive and reactive reporting. The SAMCFIR transmission phase enables sensor nodes to trigger direct transmissions for main-value reports, while in the case of SACFIR, all reports follow computed routes. Our SDN-enabled proposed models adjust the reconfiguration period according to the traffic burden on sensor nodes, which results in heterogeneity awareness, load-balancing and application-specific reconfigurations of WSNs. Extensive experimental simulation-based results show that SACFIR and SAMCFIR yield the maximum scalability, network lifetime and stability period when compared to existing routing protocols. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Software-Defined Networking Based Mobile Networks)

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