Architectural Design of an Optimal Routed Network-based Mobility Management Function for SDN-based EPC Networks

Abstract

4G/5G EPC over Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) complemented with Software Defined Networking (SDN) framework is envisioned to be a novel paradigm of network architecture that supports a variety of access technologies and solves growth challenges and requirements such seamless mobility management. Network-based localized mobility management scheme such as Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) is designed to address many of the drawbacks such as additional signaling and over-the-air tunnel overhead associated with global mobility protocols like Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6). In some deployment scenarios, PMIPv6 results in high registration, end-to-end delivery, inter- and intra-domain handoff (roaming), and route optimization latencies due to this unnecessary signaling and detour traffic path. To address these problems, in this paper we propose a route optimized PMIPv6 virtualized function over SDN framework. We first describe how PMIPv6 mechanism is transformed into a suit of virtualized network functions, and proposes design and implementation for SDN-based EPC networks in detail. Finally, simulation results show that proposed framework can improve the performance in terms of the registration, end-to-end delivery, inter- and intra-domain handoff (roaming), and route optimization latencies compared to original non-SDN based PMIPv6 framework.