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Software Defined Mobile Cloudlet

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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.

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Acknowledgments

This research work is supported by the Canadian Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council through grant STPGP 447230. Prof. M. Qiu is supported by NSF 1457506, USA.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada

    Lingxia Liao & Victor C. M. Leung

  2. Department of Computer Science, Pace University, New York, NY, USA

    Meikang Qiu

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  1. Lingxia Liao
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  2. Meikang Qiu
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  3. Victor C. M. Leung
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Correspondence to Lingxia Liao.

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Liao, L., Qiu, M. & Leung, V.C.M. Software Defined Mobile Cloudlet. Mobile Netw Appl 20, 337–347 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11036-015-0616-1

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