Design and implementation of a carrier grade software defined telecommunication switch and controller

Today's Next Generation Mobile Network architecture is challenged by several limitations in regard to the performance and flexibility. Recent investigations and proposals on core network architecture improvements through applying the Software Defined Network (SDN) concepts have been published, but no implementation has been presented yet. The main contribution of this paper is the design, implementation and validation of a Carrier Grade Software Defined Telecommunication system consisting of an OpenFlow Controller (OFC), Switch (OFS) and Protocol (OFP) according to latest OpenFlow (OF) standards and optimized for an 3GPP Evolved Packet Core (EPC). This paper first presents related work, positions contributions of this paper against the State of the Art and identifies important requirements for a new telecommunication network architecture. Secondly as a main contribution, the specifications of Software Defined Telecommunication OFC, OFS and OFP are presented as an architectural extension for the Evolved Packet Core (EPC). A section on the implementation of the presented specifications highlights the most relevant software technical design decisions. An extensive evaluation validates and evaluates the prototype within an existing Evolved Packet Core implementation. A summary concludes all finding of the authors and presents planned Future Work finally.