Enabling Distributed Mobility Management: A Unified Wireless Network Architecture Based on Virtualized Core Network

In this paper, a Software Defined Networking (SDN) based unified wireless network architecture is proposed to enable distributed mobility management. The proposed approach envisions a virtualized control plane, placed in the Cloud. The user plane is free of typical tunnelling mechanisms and utilizes layer 2 and layer 3 traffic forwarding. The network architecture for cellular users is described first. Then, traffic flow in both upstream and downstream directions, different mobility scenarios, and an efficient address assignment scheme are discussed. An analytical model to estimate the signaling overhead in the Evolved Packet Core (EPC) is presented. The architecture is further extended to support WLAN users in fixed networks, with a description of the signaling schemes required in a number of mobility events.