OpenRadio and Software Defined Cellular Wireless Networking
As with most aspects of computer science, wireless network technology has evolved over the years by way of competing proposals and protocols, developed within academia, industry, or often through collaboration of the public and private sectors. As public adoption of computer networks increased, the demand for methods of connecting these networks and allowing users to access their resources led engineers and theoreticians to adapt existing electromagnetic radiation to transmit computer data over the same media which had previously been used to broadcast audio and video signals. For as widespread as the use of these technologies has become, most of the advancement and innovation still comes from within a relatively small community of experts in and around Silicon Valley. The subject of this report is one such collaboration known as the Open Networking Research Center, or ORNC, a joint task force between Stanford University and University of California at Berkeley, sponsored by prominent technology companies such as HP, Intel, Google, Cisco and VMWare. One of the projects that ONRC is working on is to develop a software defined networking solution for cellular wireless data networks, which they refer to as OpenRadio. This report will focus on what ONRC perceives as the problem or shortcoming with the current TCP/IP infrastructure which supports cellular wireless, what they propose as their solution, and how close they are to making their solution feasible and advantageous.
According to the ONRC web page for the OpenRadio project, the primary challenge of the current cellular infrastructure is two-fold: exponential increases in the volume and diversity of end-user traffic, and a simultaneous flattening out of spectrum availability and efficiency. Industry reports estimate that at current rates of growth,