Transparent mobility or devices on the Internet using OpenFlow

Abstract

In the last years the number of mobile devices connected to the Internet has experienced a significant growth. However, efficient mobility management is still a challenge, specially if we consider minimal changes in the core network and in the user's applications. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a mobility management scheme for the Internet, which the key idea consists of bringing to the edge of the network all the complexity related to mobility. Thus, our proposal not only avoid changing the code of existing applications, but we also avoid any change in the core of the network, as required by other solutions based on virtualization or content centric networks. Our scheme uses an Software-Defined Networking (SDN) controller to manage a Global Name Service (GNS) to keep track of the location of nodes. We implement our mobility management scheme and evaluate its performance.