Building programmable wireless networks: An architectural survey

Abstract

Abstract: In recent times, there is increasing consensus that the traditional Internet architecture needs to be evolved for it to sustain unstinted growth and innovation. A major reason for the perceived architectural ossification is the lack of the ability to program the network as a system. This situation has resulted partly from historical decisions in the original Internet design which emphasized decentralized network operations through colocated data and control planes on each network device. The situation for wireless networks is no different resulting in a lot of complexity and a plethora of largely incompatible wireless technologies. With traditional architectures providing limited support for programmability, there is a broad realization in the wireless community that future programmable wireless networks would require significant architectural innovations. In this paper, we will present an unified overview of the programmability solutions that have been proposed at the device and the network level. In particular, we will discuss software-defined radio (SDR), cognitive radio (CR), programmable MAC processor, and programmable routers as device-level programmability solutions, and software-defined networking (SDN), cognitive wireless networking (CWN), virtualizable wireless networking (VWN) and cloud-based wireless networking (CbWN) as network-level programmability solutions. We provide both a self-contained exposition of these topics as well as a broad survey of the application of these trends in modern wireless networks.