Distributed Mobility Management solutions for next mobile network architectures

Abstract

The architecture of current operator infrastructures is being challenged by the non-stopping growing demand of data hungry services appearing every day. Deployed operator networks are focused on providing mobile services to users, relying on hierarchical architectures and protocols, such as Proxy Mobile IP, which force all the traffic to and from the terminals to traverse specific gateways connecting the network to the Internet. Such approaches pose several scalability problems when dealing with high demanding users. This has triggered to study how to provide mobility services in a flatter network architecture, enabling local access to the Internet, in order to reduce the amount of traffic traversing the core. Due to the novelty of these ideas, several possible solutions are being discussed and evaluated. This work aims at comparing the three more prominent families of solutions currently discussed at the IETF, providing an analysis of their scalability characteristics, both from an analytic and experimental point of view.