SDN-based distributed mobility management for 5G networks

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is transforming the networking ecosystem. SDN allows network operators to easily and quickly introduce new services and flexibly adapt to their requirements, while simplifying the network management to reduce the cost of operation, maintenance and deployment. On the other hand, mobility is a key aspect for the future mobile networks. In this context, Distributed Mobility Management (DMM) has been recently introduced as a new trend to overcome the limitations of the today's mobility management protocols which are highly centralized and hierarchical. Driven from the fact that DMM and SDN share the same principle in which the data and control plane are decoupled, we propose a DMM solution based on SDN architecture called S-DMM. This solution offers a lot of advantages including no need to deploy any mobility-related component at the access router, independence of the underlying technologies, and per-flow mobility support. On one hand, the numerical results prove that S-DMM is more scalable than the legacy DMM. On the other hand, the experiment results from a real implementation show that S-DMM comes at no performance penalty (in terms of handover latency and end-to-end delay) compared to legacy DMM, yet at a slightly better management cost, which makes S-DMM a promising candidate for a mobility management solution in the context of 5G networks.