Patent ID: 9497661
Filing Date: 2016-11-15
CPC Classification: H04L,H04W

Claim Text:
1. A method for implementing a control plane of a core network of a communications network including a set of access networks each connected to the core network, the control plane implemented in a cloud computing system, the cloud computing system including a cloud manager and a controller, the controller to execute a plurality of control plane modules, the control plane to communicate with a data plane of the core network implemented in a plurality of network elements of the core network through a control protocol, the core network with the control plane implemented in the cloud computing system utilizing resources more efficiently than an architecture with the control plane implemented in the plurality of network elements of the core network, the method comprising the steps of: initializing the plurality of control plane modules of the core network within the controller, each control plane module in the plurality of control plane modules initialized as a separate virtual machine by the cloud manager, each control plane module to provide a set of control plane functions for managing the data plane; monitoring, by the cloud manager, resource utilization of each control plane module and the control plane traffic handled by each control plane module; detecting, by the cloud manager, a threshold level of resource utilization or traffic load for one of the plurality of control plane modules of the core network; initializing a new control plane module as a separate virtual machine by the cloud manager in response to detecting the threshold level, the new control plane module to share the load of the one of the plurality of control plane modules; signaling the plurality of network elements in the data plane to establish flow rules and actions to establish differential routing of flows in the data plane using the control protocol, wherein the control protocol is an Open Flow protocol, and wherein flow matches are encoded using an extensible match structure in which a flow match is encoded as a type-length-value (TLV); and configuring, by the controller, each network element in the plurality of network elements to extend an OpenFlow table to include a general packet radio service (GPRS) tunneling protocol (GTP) header and GTP tunnel endpoint identifier to support forwarding of GTP session flows.