KLEIN: A Minimally Disruptive Design for an Elastic Cellular Core
Title | KLEIN: A Minimally Disruptive Design for an Elastic Cellular Core |
Publication Type | Conference Paper |
Year of Publication | 2016 |
Authors | Qazi, Zafar Ayyub, Penumarthi, Phani Krishna, Sekar, Vyas, Gopalakrishnan, Vijay, Joshi, Kaustubh, Das, Samir R. |
Conference Name | Proceedings of the Symposium on SDN Research |
Publisher | ACM |
Conference Location | New York, NY, USA |
ISBN Number | 978-1-4503-4211-7 |
Keywords | Middlebox, network function virtualization, network management, pubcrawl170201, software-defined networking |
Abstract | Today's cellular core, which connects the radio access network to the Internet, relies on fixed hardware appliances placed at a few dedicated locations and uses relatively static routing policies. As such, today's core design has key limitations--it induces inefficient provisioning tradeoffs and is poorly equipped to handle overload, failure scenarios, and diverse application requirements. To address these limitations, ongoing efforts envision "clean slate" solutions that depart from cellular standards and routing protocols; e.g., via programmable switches at base stations and per-flow SDN-like orchestration. The driving question of this work is to ask if a clean-slate redesign is necessary and if not, how can we design a flexible cellular core that is minimally disruptive. We propose KLEIN, a design that stays within the confines of current cellular standards and addresses the above limitations by combining network functions virtualization with smart resource management. We address key challenges w.r.t. scalability and responsiveness in realizing KLEIN via backwards-compatible orchestration mechanisms. Our evaluations through data-driven simulations and real prototype experiments using OpenAirInterface show that KLEIN can scale to billions of devices and is close to optimal for wide variety of traffic and deployment parameters. |
URL | http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2890955.2890961 |
DOI | 10.1145/2890955.2890961 |
Citation Key | qazi_klein:_2016 |