Towards flat and distributed mobility management: A 3GPP evolved network design

The last few years have seen an exponential increase in mobile data use, coming primarily as a result of the “iPhone revolution”. Mobile operators are currently facing traffic demands higher than what their networks can support, which has triggered the need of implementing offloading mechanisms at different levels of the architecture. One of the problems is that existing mobility procedures are highly centralized, requiring all data traffic to traverse the mobile operator´s network core. This paper presents an evolved 3GPP architecture that supports full distributed mobility management, while allowing incremental deployment and co-existence with existing solutions.