Resource Allocation in Software Defined Wireless Networks

Recently, various wireless networks have been deployed, and thus people can access the Internet conveniently. However, traditional architectures are closed and ossified, which causes wireless networks to become complicated, inflexible, and expensive. As a result, there are several challenges for management and QoS guarantees that should be addressed. In order to solve these challenges, a new architecture should be designed. To this end, SDN techniques have been a hot topic due to the advantages of flexibility and cost efficiency. In this article, we first introduce the basic idea of SDN and discuss the reason why using software defined wireless networking (SDWN) is necessary. Second, we review some typical SDWN-based architectures, and show a hierarchical mobile cloud computing based software defined wireless network (MCC-SDWN) for fifth generation wireless networks. Next, the state-of-the-art work on resource allocation for MCC-SDWN is reviewed. For performance evaluation and simulation, some mainstream implemental tools and simulation platforms are introduced. We also discuss potential problems and solutions.