Building Flexible, Low-Cost Wireless Access Networks With Magma
Abstract
Billions of people remain without Internet access due to availability or affordability of service. In this paper, we present Magma, an open and flexible system for building low-cost wireless access networks. Magma aims to connect users where operator economics are difficult due to issues such as low population density or income levels, while preserving features expected in cellular networks such as authentication and billing policies. To achieve this, and in contrast to traditional cellular networks, Magma adopts an approach that extensively leverages Internet design patterns, terminating access network-specific protocols at the edge and abstracting the access network from the core architecture. This decision allows Magma to refactor the wireless core using SDN (software-defined networking) principles and leverage other techniques from modern distributed systems. In doing so, Magma lowers cost and operational complexity for network operators while achieving resilience, scalability, and rich policy support.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2209.10001,
title = {Building Flexible, Low-Cost Wireless Access Networks With Magma},
author = {Shaddi Hasan and Amar Padmanabhan and Bruce Davie and Jennifer Rexford and Ulas Kozat and Hunter Gatewood and Shruti Sanadhya and Nick Yurchenko and Tariq Al-Khasib and Oriol Batalla and Marie Bremner and Andrei Lee and Evgeniy Makeev and Scott Moeller and Alex Rodriguez and Pravin Shelar and Karthik Subraveti and Sudarshan Kandi and Alejandro Xoconostle and Praveen Kumar Ramakrishnan and Xiaochen Tian and Anoop Tomar},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2209.10001},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
15 pages, 10 figures, to be published in the 20th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (2023), source code available at https://github.com/magma/magma