Traffic Steering for SDN-based Cellular Networks: Policy Dependent Framework

Heterogeneous network is considered as one of the promising solutions for the next-generation cellular network to manage the ever increasing demand of network capacity, and to provide desirable data rate for ensuring user satisfaction. Traffic steering (TS) is recently reported as an emerging technique for diverse objectives in the heterogeneous networks, which can steer the user's traffic to the suitable network entities. In this paper, we propose a universal TS framework, which considers the current status of the networks as well as the current condition and demand of the users to fulfill the desirable objective of the TS policy. The network monitoring capability and global view of the network are introduced by incorporating software-defined networking (SDN) into cellular network to make the dynamic decision for steering the user's traffic to the optimal access point (AP). On the top of the proposed TS framework, an operator defined steering policy assists the TS algorithm. Based on the numerical analysis, it is shown that the proposed TS framework can effectively steer the user's traffic to the optimal destination to achieve the objective of the policy. Our Proposed TS framework can be an effective management tool for the next-generation heterogeneous cellular networks.