SD-MCAN: A Software-Defined Solution for IP Mobility in Campus Area Networks

Campus Area Networks (CANs) are a subset of enterprise networks, comprised of a network core connecting multiple Local Area Networks (LANs) across a college campus. Traditionally, hosts connect to the CAN via a single point of attachment; however, the past decade has seen the employment of mobile computing rise dramatically. Mobile devices must obtain new Internet Protocol (IP) addresses at each LAN as they migrate, wasting address space and disrupting host services. To prevent these issues, modern CANs should support IP mobility: allowing devices to keep a single IP address as they migrate between LANs with low-latency handoffs. Traditional approaches to mobility may be difficult to deploy and often lead to inefficient routing, but Software-Defined Networking (SDN) provides an intriguing alternative. This thesis identifies necessary requirements for a software-defined IP mobility system and then proposes one such system, the Software-Defined Mobile Campus Area Network (SD-MCAN) architecture. SD-MCAN employs an OpenFlow-based hybrid, label-switched routing scheme to efficiently route traffic flows between mobile hosts on the CAN. The proposed architecture is then implemented as an application on the existing POX controller and evaluated on virtual and hardware testbeds. Experimental results show that SD-MCAN can process handoffs with less than 90 ms latency, suggesting that the system can support data-intensive services on mobile host devices. Finally, the POX prototype is open-sourced to aid in future research

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)