Intelligent Bandwidth Management and Reliability Control in SDN-Enabled Cellular Core Networks

With the rise of diverse vertical applications, the fifth generation cellular system (5G) is envisioned to support not only traditional user equipments (UEs) but also devices that require ultra-reliable low-latency communications. To meet the above demands, software-defined networking (SDN) has been integrated into cellular core networks (CNs), offering dynamic and flexible resource management capabilities. However, how to intelligently allocate network resources in CNs to meet diverse service requirements remains challenging. In this paper, we proposed a service-oriented intelligent resource management and reliability control framework in SDN-enabled cellular core networks, which can adapt network resources to three typical 5G applications. To improve reliability, the redundant transmission mechanism that assigns redundant paths was suggested. Results demonstrated the efficiency of the proposed bandwidth management method under different practical traffic conditions. Furthermore, redundant transmissions can improve the reliability of transmissions for both TCP and UDP flows.