Software Defined Network-Based Management Architecture for 5G Network

In today’s world and surrounding cyber-physical systems, the most adopted communication devices are Internet-enabled devices and are embedded with control functions for gaining various self-capabilities. The Internet of Things (IoT) is emerged to address and manage the challenges of connecting and communicating with a massive volume of Internet-enabled devices running various services and applications. These devices can collect data from a set of sensors monitoring physical objects and they are embedded with actuators controlling the machine systems. These quick developments were the reason for the rise of the 5G mobile network to support these large data transfers. Moreover, due to the rapid evolution in the communications technology, dynamicity of IoT networks, and the emerging usage of many heterogeneous IoT devices together, the control and management architectures adopted by the traditional Internet are not able to efficiently and effectively manage networking operations and required QoS of running services and applications. Accordingly, this raises the need to have the Software Defined Network (SDN) paradigm. SDN definition is based on the dissociation of the control plane from the data plane. This separation is the reason for ensuring flexibility and simplification of network management through control plane programmability. The control layer is often comprised of a centralized unit known as an SDN controller, which is regarded as the network's brain since it holds all of the network's policies and regulations. In this chapter, the control layer is designed and studied according to the number of controllers used, their services support, and their cooperation to provide efficient data communications in the data plane. There are different SDN control plane architectures, for managing operations and cooperation of comprised controllers in such control plane. Centralized control, distributed control, and Logically Centralized-Physically Distributed (LC-PD) control planes are the most well-known control plane architectures. The LC-PD control plane architecture is investigated in an IoT environment that uses 5G cellular network technology. The tests conducted show that implementing LC-PD control plane architecture into 5G systems increases network performance and QoS of operating network services.