Delay Analysis of Base Station Flow Table in SDN-enabled Radio Access Networks

Future generation wireless networks are designed with extremely low delay requirements which makes even small contributed delays important. On the other hand, software defined networking (SDN) has been introduced as a key enabler of future wireless and cellular networks in order to make them more flexible. In SDN, a central controller manages all network equipments by setting the match-action pairs in flow tables of the devices. However, these flow tables have limited capacity and thus are not capable of storing the rules of all the users. In this paper, we consider an SDN-enabled base station (SD-BS) in a cell equipped with a limited capacity flow table. We analyze the expected delay incurred in processing of the incoming packets to the SD-BS and present a mathematical expression for it in terms of density of the users and cell area.