Demystifying link congestion in 4G-LTE backhaul using OpenFlow

Despite the research community's extensive research towards the advancement in cellular communications, it nevertheless remains an irresolvable problem until now to tackle link congestion. Congestion in communication links may be due to traffic overload and/or link failures and/or node failures when we consider the wireless backhaul infrastructure of the network operators. While the physical layer technologies have evolved providing high-capacity air-interfaces, network devices have improved in computational power and a vast amount of exciting applications have emerged, the backhaul network architecture in its structure has not seen much change from its early days. With this as starting point, in this paper we claim that with a few "intelligent" design changes within the backhaul architecture of network operators incorporating OpenFlow protocol within the access and aggregation nodes, tackling congestion in communication links, thus becomes achievable.