Design and Implementation of a Distributed Mobility Management Entity on OpenStack

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) consists of implementing network functions as software applications that can run on general-purpose servers. This paper discusses the application of NFV to the Mobility Management Entity (MME), a control plane entity in the Evolved Packet Core (EPC). With the convergence of cloud computing and mobile networks, conventional architectures of network elements need to be re-designed in order to fully harness benefits such as scalability and elasticity. To this end, we design and implement a distributed MME with the three-tier architecture common to web applications. We deploy the components of the distributed MME on two separate OpenStack clouds and evaluate the latency of the attach procedure. We find that the placement of the components within the data center significantly affects the attach latency.