MoRule: Optimized rule placement for mobile users in SDN-enabled access networks

With the surging popularity of smartphones and tablets, mobile network traffic has dramatically increased in recent years. Software defined network (SDN) provides a scalable and flexible structure to simplify network traffic management. It has been shown that rule placement plays an important role in the performance of SDN. However, since most existing work considers static network topologies of wired networks, it cannot be directly applied for mobile networks. In this paper, we propose MoRule, an efficient rule management scheme to optimize the rule placement for mobile users. To deal with the challenges of user mobility and rule capacity constraints of switches, we design a heuristic algorithm with low-complexity to minimize the rule space occupation while guaranteeing that the mobile traffic processed by local switches is no less than a threshold. By conducting extensive simulations, we demonstrate that our proposed algorithm significantly outperforms random solutions under various network settings.