Distributed or Centralized Mobility?

Expecting a significant increase in number of mobile terminals to be managed together with a mobile data traffic boom in future heterogeneous networks, current centralized mobility management schemes may encounter scalability issues due to the creation of network bottlenecks and single point of failures. Recently, alternative approaches have been proposed to better distribute mobility management entities not only in the control plane but also in the data one like the "Dynamic Mobility Anchoring" scheme we designed. In this article we compare centralized and distributed approaches and describe our simulation environment using TCP in both schemes. The obtained results validate the adequacy and design of "Dynamic Mobility Anchoring". They confirm that we may expect interesting benefits in terms of handover latency and global scalability when moving towards such a distributed mobility management in future networks.