Inter GW Load Balancing for Next Generation Mobile Networks with Flat Architecture

With rapid growth of mobile users and developents of mobile equipments like cell phones, laptops and personal digits assistances (PDA), mobile networks have to meet dramatically increased service demands in the nearest future. The ever-increasing demands, such as the users expect to enjoy the service anywhere, anytime and the networks support a seamless mobility, driving the evolution of mobile networks at a fast pace. The next generation mobile network (LTE in 3GPP) is conducting research towards this goal. An IP protocol based flatter network architecture has been introduced in the next generation mobile networks (NGMN). In this network architecture, gateway (GW) is the only node which establishes a connection between RAN and external world. To provide capabilities of gateways catering for service demand at different stages, more advanced functions such as load balancing between gateways is proposed. Such mechanism will be used as a solution to avoid gateways congestion and optimize network performance for the future network. In this paper, based on the described flat architecture of the next generation mobile networks and some related concepts such as the pool of gateway, inter-GW load balancing approach has been introduced followed by performance evaluation. Simulation results show promising gains provided by the inter-GW load balancing mechanism for next generation systems.