Enabling dynamic reconfigurability of SDRs using SDN principles

Abstract

Dynamic reconfiguration and network programmability are active research areas. State of the art solutions use the Software Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm to provide basic data plane abstractions and programming interfaces for control and management of these abstractions; however, SDN technologies are currently limited to wired networks and do not provide the appropriate abstractions to support ever changing wireless protocols. On the other hand, the Software Defined Radio (SDR) paradigm enables complex signal processing functionality to be implemented efficiently in software, instead of on specialized hardware; however, SDR does not cater to the demand for adaptive radio network management with respect to changing channel conditions and policies. To overcome these limitations, we present CrossFlow, a principled approach for application development in SDR networks. CrossFlow defines fundamental radio port abstractions and an interface to manipulate them. It provides a flexible and modular cross-layer architecture using the principles of SDR and a mechanism for centralized control using the principles of SDN. Through the convergence of SDN and SDR, Cross- Flow works towards providing a target independent framework for application development in wireless radio networks. We validate our design using proof-of-concept applications, namely, adaptive modulation, frequency hopping, and cognitive radio.