MultiPath TCP to support user's mobility in future LTE network

Abstract

Mobile networks have achieved a high-level of acceptance, mainly due to the ubiquitously deployment and ever growing connectivity through various wireless access technologies for new services, being available to mobile users. The core architecture of existing mobile networks does not scale well to accommodate future traffic demands owing to its highly centralized and hierarchical composition. Decentralization of the network architecture, is believed to be a sustainable trend against to the constantly growing of mobile data traffic. Given that LTE will handle substantial part of the worldwide mobile data traffic in the coming 5–10 years, in this paper we discuss an approach for realizing a decentralized LTE architecture. Next, we present a novel scheme to support user's mobility in this architecture. The proposed solution can handle seamless data traffic steering and session continuity for the users moving among the distributed anchor points, in a resource-efficient manner and with a minimal impact on the existing network implementation. Our approach is based on the MPTCP (Multipath TCP) which is also one of the most important candidate protocols to enhance end-to-end communication reliability, resiliency and bandwidth efficiency in the future mobile networks (5G). We used the NS3-LENA simulation software to implement a decentralized LTE network as well as the proposed mobility management scheme. The evaluation results show that the proposed solution efficiently fulfill the functionality and performance requirements related to mobility management.