Software Defined Mobile Cloudlet

Lingxia Liao, Meikang Qiu, Victor C. M. Leung

Abstract: Using cloudlets in mobile networks mitigates the resource limitation of mobile devices to process the applications with rich media content and highly interaction. However, this approach changes the original traffic routing path of mobile networks and causes integration complexity that cannot be easily solved without modifying the current mobile network elements and routing policies over current IP transport network. OpenFlow based SDN architecture can use its centralized control plane to oversee its data paths and enable flexible traffic routing. Combining SDN to cloudlets creates possibilities to reduce this complexity. In this article, we propose a novel SDN based cloudlet approach that deploys cloudlets in a Mobile Telephone Switch Office, where a SDN based transport network that supports an enhanced OpenFlow 1.3 protocol is enabled. With this enhanced OpenFlow 1.3 protocol, each switch/ router and controller within this transport network can extract the source IP of a user packet encapsulated by a GTP header, so that the user packets from a particular remote mobile service front end can be identified and redirected to a local cloudlet without modifying the existing mobile network elements and routing paths. A proof-of-concept prototype is provided, and its functionality and performance is evaluated over a small test bed emulated by Mininet.