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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Dr. Akyildiz, Advisor
Dr. Ji, Chair
Dr. Li
Abstract: The objective of the proposed research is to introduce a new software-defined architecture, called SoftAir, through software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) solutions for 5G cellular systems. The concept of SDN has been proposed to efficiently create centralized network abstraction with the provisioning of programmability over the entire network. Moreover, the complementary concept of NFV has been further proposed to effectively separate the abstraction of functionalities from the hardware, such as decoupling the data forwarding plane from the control plane. These two concepts bring the SoftAir architecture that provides cellular networks with the needed flexibility to evolve and adapt according to the ever-changing network context. As for the preliminary research, three management tools are built upon SoftAir. First, an in-band control traffic balancing for a centralized controller is proposed to find the optimal control traffic forwarding paths for each switch/BS in such a way the average control traffic delay in the whole network is minimized. Second, a traffic-driven optimal network planning is developed for multi-controller placement that jointly optimizes controller placement and control traffic forwarding paths so that the required controllers and the control traffic delay are minimized simultaneously. Third, two delay-based hypervisors are proposed to achieve high system performance with hybrid light-tailed and heavy-tailed traffic flows. For the proposed work, three software-defined traffic engineering solutions will be developed in SoftAir. The dynamic BS formation will be proposed to solve NLOS problem in 5G millimeter-wave systems. Moreover, a software-defined massive MIMO scheme will be developed via 5G spectral-efficient controller. Finally, the joint dynamic clustering and accelerated scheduling will be investigated in 5G SoftAir.
