Software-defined mobility management: Architecture proposal and future directions

A common characteristic for all of the uses in 5G wireless networks is the ubiquity and the almost permanent connection to the mobile network to get access to external applications. This really imposes a challenge in the signaling procedures provided to get track of the user and to guarantee session continuity. The mobility management mechanisms will play a central role in the 5G networks because of the always-on connectivity demand. This article presents a software defined approach to mobility management procedures addressing the present challenges and proposing some future directions for a more efficient service provision and a better usage of the network resources. The feasibility of such a Software-Defined Mobility Management architecture is assessed in a specific test-bed

Mobility Management in New Internet Architectures

The software integration with new network architectures via Software-Defined Networking (SDN) axis appears to be a major evolution of networks. While this paradigm was primarily developed for easy network setup, its ability to integrate services has also to be considered. Thus, the mobility service for which solutions have been proposed in conventional architectures by defining standardized protocols should be rethought in terms of SDN service. Mobile devices might use or move in SDN network. In this thesis, we proposed a new mobility management approach which called "SDN-Mobility" and has shown that SDN can be implemented without IP mobility protocol for providing mobility like as Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) that is the solution adopted by 3GPP, with some performance gain. However, PMIPv6 and SDN-Mobility have some packets loss during Mobile Node (MN) handover. Thus, in this thesis, we proposed a new paradigm based on caching function to improve the quality of transfer during handover. Caching policy cooperates with SDN controller for automatic buffering of the data during the handover. We proposed two caching policies that are compared through a performance analysis regarding the quality of transfer for the user and for the operator. This thesis also presented that SDN-Mobility with caching policy can be applied easily for mobility management in heterogeneous network architectures able to integrate the future Internet based on the Information-Centric Networking (ICN)

SLICING-BASED RESOURCE ALLOCATION AND MOBILITY MANAGEMENT FOR EMERGING WIRELESS NETWORKS

The proliferation of smart mobile devices and user applications has continued to contribute to the tremendous volume of data traffic in cellular networks. Moreover, with the feature of heterogeneous connectivity interfaces of these smart devices, it becomes more complex for managing the traffic volume in the context of mobility. To surmount this challenge, service and resource providers are looking for alternative mechanisms that can successfully facilitate managing network resources and mobility in a more dynamic, predictive and distributed manner. New concepts of network architectures such as Software-Defined Network (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) have paved the way to move from static to flexible networks. They make networks more flexible (i.e., network providers capable of on-demand provisioning), easily customizable and cost effective. In this regard, network slicing is emerging as a new technology built on the concepts of SDN and NFV. It splits a network infrastructure into isolated virtual networks and allows them to manage network resources based on their requirements and characteristics. Most of the existing solutions for network slicing are facing challenges in terms of resource and mobility management. Regarding resource management, it creates challenges in terms of provisioning network throughput, end-to-end delay, and fairness resources allocation for each slice, whereas, in the case of mobility management, due to the rapid change of user mobility the network slice operator would like to hold the mobility controlling over its clients across different access networks, rather than the network operator, to ensure better services and user experience. In this thesis, we propose two novel architectural solutions to solve the challenges identified above. The first proposed solution introduces a Network Slicing Resource Management (NSRM) mechanism that assigns the required resources for each slice, taking into consideration resource isolation between different slices. The second proposed v solution provides a Mobility Management architecture-based Network Slicing (MMNS) where each slice manages its users across heterogeneous radio access technologies such as WiFi, LTE and 5G networks. In MMNS architecture, each slice has different mobility demands (e.g,. latency, speed and interference) and these demands are governed by a network slice configuration and service characteristics. In addition, NSRM ensures isolating, customizing and fair sharing of distributed bandwidths between various network slices and users belonging to the same slice depending on different requirements of each one. Whereas, MMNS is a logical platform that unifies different Radio Access Technologies (RATs) and allows all slices to share them in order to satisfy different slice mobility demands. We considered two software simulations, namely OPNET Modeler and OMNET++, to validate the performance evaluation of the thesis contributions. The simulation results for both proposed architectures show that, in case of NSRM, the resource blocking is approximately 35% less compared to the legacy LTE network, which it allows to accommodate more users. The NSRM also successfully maintains the isolation for both the inter and intra network slices. Moreover, the results show that the NSRM is able to run different scheduling mechanisms where each network slice guarantee perform its own scheduling mechanism and simultaneously with other slices. Regarding the MMNS, the results show the advantages of the proposed architecture that are the reduction of the tunnelling overhead and the minimization of the handover latency. The MMNS results show the packets delivery cost is optimal by reducing the number of hops that the packets transit between a source node and destination. Additionally, seamless session continues of a user IP-flow between different access networks interfaces has been successfully achieved

Survey on PMIPv6-based Mobility Management Architectures for Software-Defined Networking

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has changed the network landscape. Meanwhile, IP-based mobility management still evolves, and SDN affects it dramatically. Integrating Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) – a network-based mobility management protocol – with the SDN paradigm has created several promising approaches. This paper will present an extensive survey on the joint research area of PMIPv6 and SDN mobility management by detailing the available SDN-integrated network-based techniques and architectures that intend to accelerate handover and mitigate service disruption of mobility events in softwareized telecommunication networks. The article also provides an overview of where PMIPv6 can be used and how SDN may help reach those ways