Software defined networking for security enhancement in wireless mobile networks

In recent years we have seen a fast change in the networking industry: leading by the Software Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm that separates the control plane from the data plane to enable programmability and centralized control of the network infrastructure, the SDN design not only simplifies the network management but also accelerates the innovation speed of deploying advanced network applications. Meanwhile, the landscape of the wireless and mobile industry is changing dramatically as well. Given the advance of wireless technologies such as 4G and WiFi offering a pervasive Internet access, the traffic growth from the smartphone-alike devices has placed an increasing strain on the mobile network infrastructure and infringed the profit. Since the demand is increasing together with the growth of mobile users, the incumbent legacy infrastructure is already calling for an upgrade to overcome its existing limitations in terms of network management and security. In this paper, we advocate that the way forward is to integrate SDN and fully utilize its feature to solve the problem. As the security issue has raise serious concern in the networking community recently, we focus on the security aspect and investigate how to enhance the security with SDN for the wireless mobile networks. Crown Copyright (C) 2014 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.