Browsing by Author "Mäki, Jussi Olavi Aleksis"

With the increasing growth of data traffic in mobile networks there is an ever growing demand from the operators for a more scalable and cost efficient network core. Recent successes in deploying Software-Defined Networking (SDN) in data centers and large network backbones has given it credibility as a viable solution for meeting the requirements of even the large core networks. Software-Defined Networking is a novel new paradigm where the control logic of the network is separated from the network elements into logically centralized controllers. This separation of concerns offers more flexibility in network control and makes writing of new management applications, such as routing protocols, easier, faster and more manageable. This thesis is an empirical experiment in designing and implementing a scalable and fault- tolerant distributed SDN controller and management application for managing the GPRS Tunneling Protocol flows that carry the user data traffic within the Evolved Packet Core. The experimental implementation is built using modern open-source distributed system tools such as the Apache Zookeeper distributed coordination service and Basho's Riak distributed key-value database. In addition to the design, a prototype implementation is presented and its performance is evaluated.