Introducing wireless access programmability using software-defined infrastructure

Programmability in wireless access networks can provide unprecedented flexibility in meeting the communications needs of a diverse set of wireless devices under changing demand and network conditions. Programmability also holds the promise of enabling multiple simultaneous virtual operators providing a variety of access networks that offer different services using different business models. In this paper we present our work on enabling wireless access network programmability in the SAVI testbed. We introduce an architecture for Software-Defined Infrastructure that offers virtualized heterogeneous resources in support of services and applications. Central to this architecture is the Janus SDI resource manager that can coordinate the actions of a set of controllers, e.g. OpenStack, OpenFlow, and other controllers such as a wireless access controller. We describe a design where Janus is used to integrate the wireless access network into a Smart Edge node. We introduce use cases that exploit the flexibility offered by this design, and we present experimental results from our implementation.