uLIPA: A universal local IP access solution for 3GPP mobile networks

Machine-to-machine (M2M) communication technologies have been rapidly developed in recent years to support different kinds of applications, such as automatic monitoring from user equipments (UEs) to home devices. Unfortunately, such applications introduce heavy traffic in both the radio access networks and core networks (CNs). 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) has defined its local IP access (LIPA) solution, which provides UEs with the ability to access home networks directly without traversing CNs. However, 3GPP LIPA can not support the universal LIPA service. Specifically, a UE´s home LIPA service can not be accessed when the UE moves into the coverage area of a visited LIPA network or a macrocell. On the other hand, the recently developed traffic offload enhancements for 3GPP networks did not consider the authentication issue. This paper proposes a telecom-based universal LIPA solution, uLIPA, for 3GPP networks. To completely offload both the UE´s traffic and control signaling messages from the CN, uLIPA first enhances the existing 3GPP LIPA architecture and routing path establishment procedure by incorporating the concept of local SGSN and local GGSN. Then, an effective one-pass signaling procedure is devised for mutual authentication among the UE, the visited LIPA network, and the home LIPA network. Since this authentication procedure is based on the 3GPP authentication framework, it can readily be adopted by the 3GPP and compatible mobile networks.