SDN-Sim: Integrating System Level Simulator with Software Defined Network

© 2020 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. With the introduction of diverse technology paradigms in next-generation cellular and vehicular networks, design and structural complexity are skyrocketing. The beyond- 5G use cases such as mobile broadband, 5G-V2X and UAV communications require support for ultra-low latency and high throughput and reliability with limited operational complexity and cost. These use cases are being explored in 3GPP Release 16 and 17. To facilitate end-to-end performance evaluation for these applications, we propose SDN-Sim - an integration of a System Level Simulator (SLS) with a Software Defined Network (SDN) infrastructure. While the SLS models the communication channel and evaluates system performance on the physical and data link layers, the SDN performs network and application tasks such as routing, load balancing, etc. The proposed architecture replicates the SLS-defined topology into an SDN emulator for offloading control operations. It uses link and node information calculated by the SLS to compute routes in SDN and feeds the results back to the SLS. Along with the architecture, data modeling and processing, replication and route calculation frameworks are proposed.