Service-oriented 5G network architecture: An end-to-end software defining approach

With the ever-increasing mobile demands and proliferation of mobile services, mobile Internet has penetrated into every aspect of human life. Although the 4G mobile communication system is now being deployed worldwide, simply evolving or incrementally improving the current mobile networks can no longer keep the pace with the proliferation of mobile services. Against this background, aiming to achieve service-oriented 5G mobile networks, this article proposes an end-to-end software defining architecture, which introduces a logically centralized control plane and dramatically simplifies the data-plane. The control plane decomposes the diversified mobile service requirements and, correspondingly, controls the functions and behaviors of data-plane devices. Consequently, the network directly orients towards services, and the devices are dynamically operated according to the service requirements. Therefore, the proposed architecture efficiently guarantees the end-to-end QoS and quality of experience. The challenges and key technologies of our architecture are also discussed in this article. Real traces-based simulations validate the performance advantages of proposed architecture, including energy efficiency and the whole performance.