A Framework for Interference Control in Software-Defined Mobile Radio Networks

To cope up with the booming of data traffic and to accommodate new and emerging technologies such as machine-type communications, the 5th Generation (5G) of mobile networks must be empowered with efficient resource allocation schemes that benefit from the adoption of the Software-Defined networking (SDN) paradigm. In radio communications, allocation of resources is tightly connected with interference. In this paper, we revisit the way wireless interference is managed and avoided relying on the SDN paradigm for controlling the network. The SDN approach is exploited to expose the lower layers of the stack (e.g., Physical and Medium Access Control) to the controller and its applications by making system parameters available, such that it is possible to dynamically configure the network in a logically centralized fashion, by means of specifically designed algorithms. The contribution of this work is threefold. First, we show how to adapt the SDN paradigm to mobile networks. Second, we propose the interference graph as an abstraction that can be used to control interference. Last, we formulate a throughput optimization tool that uses the proposed interference graph as an input.