UCLA

With the growth of mobile users and the ever-increasing amount of data exchange, mobile network systems must be able to handle the explosion in application traffic and service requirement of users. By utilizing the growth in capabilities of mobile platforms such as vehicles, Mobile Cloud brings together Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) and wireless networks to interconnect mobile devices and become a cloud-like service provider. In the first part of the thesis, we demonstrate the benefits of the Mobile Cloud by introducing a flexible experiment structure that utilizes virtualization and resource sharing to allow different protocols to be compared in the same mobility pattern and channel conditions in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs). A virtualized environment is setup on each node where the combination of Xen and gentoo software is used to create multiple virtual guests.

However, even with the benefits brought by virtualization and resource sharing, Mobile Cloud network architectures still lacks in flexibility, making it difficult to change and re-configure network behavior, and new services hard or costly to deploy. Also, without flexibility to apply network policies, it is difficult to adapt Mobile Clouds to changing conditions, resulting in a lack of automation and traffic differentiation hard to enforce. In the second part of the thesis, we introduce Software-Defined Mobile Networks, using software defined paths, topologies, virtual networks to improve and complement current Mobile Cloud services. Our approach focuses on two concepts: The first is virtualization, where we use the benefits of Mobile Cloud to share resources to provide utility and services over a network. The second is Software-Defined Networking (SDN), where we apply the emerging SDN technology to take the Mobile Cloud one step further by bringing flexibility, programmability, and control. We first provide a background on SDN and how SDN is used for wireless and mobile, including several prototypes we built to show how such systems can operate in real-world situations. We then propose designs for Software-Defined Mobile Networks architectures, with an emphasis on Software-Defined Vehicle Network (SDVN) architecture and its operational mode to adapt SDN to VANET environments. We present the required core components to build our SDVN system, including variations that are required to accommodate different wireless environments, such as mobility and unreliable wireless link conditions. We also present the benefits of a SDVN and the services that it can enable by building and evaluating multiple SDVN features, and comparing it with traditional VANETs and Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs).

Mobile Cloud enables new services with virtualization and resource sharing, and Software-Defined Mobile Networks takes Mobile Cloud further by adding network programmability, flexibility, and control. We show that by combining the two ideas together, we can now form the Software-defined Mobile Cloud.