Flexible Traffic Management in Broadband Access Networks using Software Defined Networking

Abstract-Over the years, the demand for high bandwidth services, such as live and on-demand video streaming, steadily increased. The adequate provisioning of such services is challenging and requires complex network management mechanisms to be implemented by Internet service providers (ISPs). In current broadband network architectures, the traffic of subscribers is tunneled through a single aggregation point, independent of the different service types it belongs to. While having a single aggregation point eases the management of subscribers for the ISP, it implies huge bandwidth requirements for the aggregation point and potentially high end-to-end latency for subscribers. An alternative would be a distributed subscriber management, adding more complexity to the management itself. In this paper, a new traffic management architecture is proposed that uses the concept of Software Defined Networking (SDN) to extend the existing Ethernet-based broadband network architecture, enabling a more efficient traffic management for an ISP. By using SDN-enabled home gateways, the ISP can configure traffic flows more dynamically, optimizing throughput in the network, especially for bandwidth-intensive services. Furthermore, a proofof-concept implementation of the approach is presented to show the general feasibility and study configuration tradeoffs. Analytic considerations and testbed measurements show that the approach scales well with an increasing number of subscriber sessions

Secure and scalable multimedia sharing between smart homes

The smartphone revolution together with cost-efficient wireless access technologies have lately changed the landscape for smart home environments to a large extent. Moreover, large flat screens, new capturing devices, and large digital media libraries have also changed the way smart home environments are used. We present and evaluate an architecture for multimedia sharing in such environments. End-users can, by authenticating their terminals with a node in the home or visited environment easily gain access to various types of resources at home while roaming to other people's home networks. This is achieved by using the infrastructure provided by the operator.Validerad; 2014; 20140406 (karand)NIMO - Nordic Interaction and Mobility Research Platfor

Nomadic mobility between smart homes

Powerful, user-friendly mobile devices and cost-efficient wireless access technologies have lately changed the landscape for smart home environments to a large extent. Developments in the media landscape with large flat screens, new capturing devices, and large digital media libraries have also changed the way smart home environments are used. This paper presents and evaluates an architecture for nomadic mobility in such environments where end-users, by authenticating their terminals with a node in the home or visited environment using the infrastructure provided by the operator, easily can gain access to various types of resources at home while roaming to other people's home networks.Godkänd; 2012; 20120820 (karand)NIMO - Nordic Interaction and Mobility Research Platfor

OpenBNG: Central office network functions on programmable data plane hardware

Telecommunication providers continuously evolve their network infrastructure by increasing performance, lowering time to market, providing new services, and reducing the cost of the infrastructure and its operation. Network function virtualization (NFV) on commodity hardware offers an attractive, low-cost platform to establish innovations much faster than with purpose-built hardware products. Unfortunately, implementing NFV on commodity processors does not match the performance requirements of the high-throughput data plane components in large carrier access networks. Therefore, programmable hardware architectures like field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), network processors, and switch silicon supporting the flexibility of the P4 language offer a promising way to account for both performance requirements and the demand to quickly introduce innovations into networks. In this article, we propose a way to offer residential network access with programmable packet processing architectures. On the basis of the highly flexible P4 programming language, we present a design and open source implementation of a broadband network gateway (BNG) data plane that meets the challenging demands of BNGs in carrier-grade environments. In addition, we introduce a concept of hybrid openBNG design, realizing the required hierarchical quality of service (HQoS) functionality in a subsequent FPGA. The proposed evaluation results show the desired performance characteristics, and our proposed design together with upcoming P4 hardware can offer a giant leap towards highest performance NFV network access