Advances in LTE network monitoring: A step towards an SDN solution

Monitoring operations in today's mobile networks is becoming a more and more challenging task due to the higher bandwidth and technological complexity brought by LTE. The paper summarizes some relevant problems that arose in the tests of LTE equipment carried out at Telecom Italia Lab (TILAB, the R&D center of Telecom Italia), and presents an ongoing project that aims at realizing a flexible hardware/software platform to cope with these problems at reasonable costs. The ultimate goal of this research is to develop a Software Defined Networking (SDN) measurements platform, which permits to easily and dynamically configure the measurement devices involved in the test and monitoring functions according to the requirements defined by the operator. Furthermore, the paper proposes the integration of the designed framework in a realistic lab environment, and discusses the improvements introduced to the actual architecture.