Software defined networking for distributed mobility management

Abstract

With the mobile network core evolving towards an unlayered and decentralized architecture, distributed mobility management appears to be more compatible and efficient with the flattened networks. In this paper, we propose a new approach to realize the distributed mobility management using the software defined networking techniques instead of the existing mobility management protocols. The mobility management functions are implemented with the help of distributed controllers. The controllers will update the involved forwarding tables directly in case of handover, which realizes the route optimization inherently. The test results show that the proposed SDN-aided approach is an efficient mechanism for distributed mobility management.