New control plane in 3GPP LTE/EPC architecture for on-demand connectivity service

Abstract

The on-demand connectivity service is one of the main requirements of the cellular data network. It consists in moving sessions transparently and temporarily from one network equipment to another without causing user session interruption. This service enables networks to cope with the ever-changing network condition such as sudden congestion or arbitrary network equipment failure. In this paper, we argue that the cellular data networks such as LTE/EPC lack the network visibility and control elasticity that enable the on-demand connectivity service. The Software Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging trend that should be considered to overcomes the above drawback. As a first step, we propose an OpenFlow-based control plane for LTE/EPC architectures. Using resiliency and load balancing use cases, we show that our proposal guarantees the on-demand connectivity service.