5G-Crosshaul partner CTTC presented a demo at the Mobile World Congress 2017.
The goal of this demo is to illustrate reliability through the SDN/NFV management and orchestration of constrained 5G backhaul/fronthaul infrastructures (mmWave,Wi-Fi) for the outdoor dense urban scenario. Particularly, this demo features the connection between two transport nodes were a mmWave link (IEEE 802.11ad) acts as primary link technology, whereas a Wi-Fi link (IEEE 802.11ac) acts as a secondary link technology to increase resilience. Forwarding behavior of both transport nodes are configured with Openflow and the configuration of heterogenenous wireless node resources are done through a RESTCONF interface. Network behavior (state, statistics) is monitorised by means of a Graphical User Interface (GUI) running as an SDN application in conjunction with the SDN controller.
In the demo, a 4K video file is transmitted between hosts connected to the transport nodes. Initially, this transmission is done through the mmWave link (primary link). In the event of a link failure, the transport node detecting this anomaly informs the SDN controller, which immediately after switches the transmission to the Wi-Fi link (secondary link). When the transport node reports the recovery of the primary link, the SDN switches again the transmission to the primary link. And all of this without any interruption in the 4K video streaming.
