Towards the 5G Revolution: A Software Defined NetworkArchitecture Exploiting Network Coding as a Service

Dávid Szabó, Felicián Németh,Balázs Sonkoly∗, András Gulyás†

HSN Lab, Budapest Univ. of Technology andEconomics

{szabod,nemethf,sonkoly,gulyas}@tmit.bme.hu

Frank H.P. Fitzek5G Lab Germany, Technische Universität

Dresdenfrank.fitzek@tu-dresden.de

ABSTRACT

Many networking visioners agree that 5G will be much morethan the incremental improvement, in terms of data rate,of 4G. Besides the mobile networks, 5G will fundamentallyinfluence the core infrastructure as well. In our vision therealization of the challenging promises of 5G (e.g. extremelyfast, low-overhead, low-delay access of mostly cloudified ser-vices and content) will require the massive use of multi-pathing equipped with low overhead transport solutions tai-lored to fast, reliable and secure data retrieval from cloudarchitectures. In this demo we present a prototype architec-ture supporting such services by making use of automaticallyconfigured multipath service chains implementing networkcoding based transport solutions over off-the-shelf softwaredefined networking (SDN) components.

Categories and Subject Descriptors

C.2.3 [Computer-Communication Networks]: NetworkOperations - Network management

Keywords

SDN; Network Coding; Mininet; NFV

1. INTRODUCTIONFuture communication systems will face dramatic changes

compared to state of the art systems. With the Internet ofThings (IoT) the number of mobile and wireless devices willincrease by one or even two orders of magnitude resulting in500 billion devices by 2020. This will lead to dramatic band-width request for the overall communication system. Fur-thermore 5G is on the horizon introducing the tactile Inter-net which impose massive requirements on security, safety,resilience, throughput, and delay reduction. The huge de-mand for dramatic reduction in delay and increased through-put needs a new area of communication systems. Packet

∗MTA-BME Future Internet research group†MTA-BME Information systems research group

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SIGCOMM ’15 August 17-21, 2015, London, United Kingdom

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ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-3542-3/15/08.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2785956.2790025

switched networks, the core of today’s Internet, usually pro-vision a single path between two communication endpointson which each router performs store and forward operationfor each incoming packet. The single path does not onlylimit the throughput of the network, it is also vulnerableagainst hackers and outages. With respect to the tactileInternet the current architecture is problematic as the longdistance between the cloud service and the mobile deviceresults in too large delays.

In order to achieve high throughputs, resilience, securityand low delays a revolutionary change is currently discussed[3], namely the code centric networks. In the latter, suit-able routers may perform a different strategy referred toas compute and forward using random linear network cod-ing. This enables efficient multi path communication overpossibly lossy channels while providing inherent algebraicsecurity as hackers would need to tap all involved communi-cation systems. The use of network coding is also enablinganother important feature which is a dynamic allocation ofdistributed clouds on top of each router, placing the cloudin close proximity of the user, which enable low latencies forthe tactile Internet.

In order to use network coding efficiently, we have to or-chestrate the coders, recoders1 (a new entity introduced bynetwork coding) and decoders to meet the constraints of thephysical topology and we have to take care of steering thetraffic over them. Good news is that such orchestration andsteering is in perfect agreement with the current practiceof Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that services are imple-mented in the form of appropriately concatenated middle-boxes, also known as service chains. In this respect we seemto have a lower adoption barrier for network coding at ISPs.However, today’s service chains are usually built around spe-cial purpose networking hardware elements, configuring andoperating these chains is a highly non-trivial task which stillrequires human interaction. SDN and virtualization can bea promising way out of this managerial trap as these tech-nologies may enable flexible and automated deployment ofservice chains containing also software middleboxes or Vir-tualized Network Functions (VNF).

In this demonstration we present a system which enablesthe definition, configuration and automated deployment ofservice chains implementing code centric operation over off-the-shelf SDN components. Building on the ESCAPE [1]

1The application of recoders inside the network can signif-icanlty reduce latency and increase goodput with respectto the approaches coding only at endpoints e.g. in case ofFountain codes.

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