Software-defined networking investigated for super fast end-to-end 5G

Technology News | November 24, 2014

By eeNews Europe

The answer has been dubbed 5G, and apart from vague specifications and bits of research, 5G remains a concept at best. To be fair, at this stage, many companies and research teams are evaluating technology at the leading edge to see if a successor to 4G could be in the wings in around a decade.

Another part of this puzzle can be found in a collaboration between NEC Electronics Samsung and several academic centres in China that is tasked with investigating how software-defined cellular networking might be used to give smart phone users the next generation of super-superfast broadband, 5G.

Today, LTE standards call for peak speeds of 100 Mbit/s for mobile users, which is three times faster than the earlier 3G system. However, users commonly do not see data transfer at such high rates, downloads are usually at best 10 Mbits/s. Evidently, there is some work required to bring 4G systems up to required specification.

As yet there is no single standard for 5G although various systems are being touted based on rebuilding the cellular networks to be super-efficient and exploiting different frequencies with their capacity for greater data rates. The hope is to be able to achieve download speeds of perhaps 10 Gbits/s.

Ming Lei of Samsung Research and Development Institute China, Lei Jiang of NEC Laboratories, both in Beijing are working with colleagues at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China in Chengdu, Beijing Jiaotong University and the University of Kurdistan. They have assessed the latest developments aimed at 5G systems and have proposed their own novel end-to-end (E2E) software-defined cellular network (SDCN) architecture which they say offers flexibility, scalability, agility and efficiency. Moreover, it will be sustainable for providers as well as profitable.

They are currently building a demonstration system that will allow them to utilise several promising technologies in their architecture for 5G including cloud computing, network virtualisation, network functions virtualisation and dynamic service chaining. The approach, they suggest could overcome bandwidth shortage problems, improve quality of service so avoiding delays and data loss, as well as reducing the vast number of error-prone network nodes needed for such a system.

Their work is detailed in the International Journal of Communication Networks and Distributed Systems.