SDN‐DMM for intelligent mobility management in heterogeneous mobile IP networks

Abstract

Mobility management applied to the traditional architecture of the Internet has become a great challenge because of the exponential growth in the number of devices that can connect to the network. This article proposes a Software-Defined Networking (SDN)-based architecture, called SDN-DMM (SDN-Distributed Mobility Management), that deals with the distributed mode of mobility management in heterogeneous access networks in a simplified and efficient way, ensuring mainly the continuity of IP sessions. Intent-based mobility management with an IP mapping schema for mobile node identification offers optimized routing without tunneling techniques, hence, an efficient use of the network infrastructure. The simplified mobility control API reduces both signaling and handover latency costs and provides a better scalability and performance in comparison with traditional and SDN-based DMM approaches.An analytical evaluation of such costs demonstrated the better performance of SDN-DMM, and a proof of concept of the proposal was implemented in a real environment.The IETF IP mobility management standards, as MIPv6 6 an PMIPv6, 7 depend on central units that manage both control and data traffic, elaborated according to the traditional routing of IP packets. They also pose problems, as suboptimized routing, low scalability, processing overload in core network devices, and low granularity in the mobility management service.The suboptimized routing occurs mainly because of the use of tunneling techniques. When the mobile node (MN) performs a handover, the traffic destined to it is sent to an anchor point for encapsulation and delivered through an IP tunnel. Regardless of the MN location, the traffic always flows first to the mobility anchor and then to the MN through the IP tunnel, which decreases the goodput because of the packet overhead caused by such transportation, and increases communication latency, because of the use of a longer path.The establishment of the IP tunnel in control plane operations by a central unit, ie, mobility anchor, and forwarding of traffic to the MN in data plane operations cause low scalability and processing overload for devices, as routers, since resources are shared between packet forwarding engine and mobility management tasks.Additionally, the use of heterogeneous access networks (HetNets) imposes other difficulties to such a management, as the integrated management of resources and the soft transitions among networks.The mobility management faces a constant challenge regarding the communication network efficiency with no increase in its complexity. The addition and use of new protocols, signaling messages, or processes that cause overhead because of the encapsulation and control traffic are examples of how the mobility management directly impacts on the Operational Expenditure (OPEX) and Capital Expenditure (CAPEX) of a communication network.An alternative for dealing with the intrinsic problems of centralization and costs in the mobility management is the new concept, called distributed mobility ...

Experimental Evaluation of a SDN-DMM Architecture

“…The performance for the throughput when the mobile node is in mobility matches the cost of packets delivery analyzed in the analytical modelling [11], which shows the proposal always performs delivery in an optimized way and reduces costs in relation to the other approaches analyzed. The loss of packets and handover latency obtained in the tests can be considered coherent with the results of the analytical modeling, according to the low number of messages necessary in the control plane for mobility through the readjustment of the data plane.…”

“…This article reports on the implementation of a proposal, called SDN-DMM (Software Defined Network Architecture for Distributed Mobility Management) [11], in a real experimentation environment. The proposal is based on the SDN network paradigm, for the mobility management distributed through bidirectional IP flows.…”

Location Management in IP-based Future LEO Satellite Networks: A Review

“…However, in LEO SatNets both terminals and BS (satellites) are moving, which creates new challenges that cannot be fully addressed using existing IETF's location management techniques. In addition, IETF location management techniques are intended to work in centralized units that manage both control and data traffic (i.e., routing) [6]. As a result, IETF location management techniques have poor scalability and may create processing overload in core network devices.…”

“…The DMM concept was introduced by IETF to overcome the limitations of centralized management such as the one point of failure, bottlenecks, and high delays. DMM-based solutions can be categorized into two types, depending on the distribution level of the control plane [6]:…”

“…The merging of SDN and DDM concepts have been investigated in several types of networks. For example, an architecture that uses the SDN paradigm with the DMM concept in an environment of heterogeneous IP networks was proposed in [6]. The proposed architecture avoids the centralization problem of SDN and presents a hierarchical cluster-based implementation of the SDN-DMM controllers that ensures the scalability of the control plane and reduces the availability problem related to the single point of failure.…”