dMME: Virtualizing LTE mobility management

With the convergence between phone and data networks in LTE and 4G, cellular signaling traffic is increasingly carried over IP. Control plane functions, once performed by dedicated machinery, are evolving into large-scale network applications with strict requirements on delay, availability, and processing throughput as mandated by 3GPP standards. In this paper we present dMME, a distributed architecture that implements mobility management for next-generation cellular systems. dMME is a scalable and cost-effective drop-in replacement for the LTE mobility management entity (MME). We evaluate the dMME scheme via analysis and simulation under several deployment scenarios, using mobility patterns drawn from synthetic models and from traces collected in a production network. We also report preliminary performance figures by our dMME prototype implementation. Our results confirm that distributed architectures are a viable choice to reliably support high-throughput, latency-sensitive control plane functions.