New Approach for Mobility Management in Openflow/Software-Defined Networks

The Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm predicts that the evolution of cellular and wireless networks will bring a considerable increase of two factors, the densification of the Radio Access Network (RAN) part and the progressive demand for traffic. This rapid evolution has led to the emergence of extremely complicated systems, where a large number of logic modules must interact to lead to the desired behavior and the desired quality of service. The key advantage of SDNs is the simplicity of networking and the deployment of new mechanisms and applications. Furthermore, the programmable aspect on the traffic and devices in SDNs makes them more efficient and flexible than traditional networks. In this context, Distributed Mobility Management (DMM) has been recently presented as a new trend to solve the issues of the today’s mobility management protocols. In this paper, we propose a partially distributed Mobility Management for OpenFlow/SDN networks. According to simulation results, our approach guarantees a significant reduction of the number of handover and the signaling cost.