USD: A user-centric software defined platform for 5G mobile devices

Abstract

This paper introduces USD, a novel User-centric Software Defined platform for 5G mobile devices, which supports a wide range of users with the diversity of technical experience. Respecting user preferences, USD is able to exploit multiple wireless networks, as well as, to differentiate application traffic. The advantages of USD are realized by using a set of network virtualization (NW) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) technologies. Similar to the state-of-the-art works, USD leverages SDN in the exploitation of multiple networks. However, USD uniquely uses network namespace to isolate an application traffic at a granularity as fine as a process (i.e., each process’s traffic belong to one networking stack). Moreover, USD relaxes the dependence on radio hardware by using wireless virtualization. The relaxation aims not only to efficiently utilize 5G networking resources but also to add an usercentric interface. As a proof of concept, we implement a prototype of USD using the Wi-Fi, Open vSwitch, and the network virtualization technologies. We evaluate the performance of USD in a comparison with a legacy platform in an assuming 5G scenario. The evaluation results show that the USD prototype achieves comparable performances to the legacy platform while it introduces the advanced user-centric features.