Experimental Evaluation of an SDN-based Distributed Mobility Management Solution

Abstract

The current wireless network architecture needs to be re-thought to support mobility in very dense and heterogeneous network deployments. We propose and experimentally evaluate a novel SDN-based architecture which makes use of DMM concepts to deploy fast, flexible, reliable, and scalable mobility management mechanisms at both local and regional scopes. Our solution is compatible with existing protocols deployed in wireless access and backhaul networks, and is therefore technology transparent to the user. Although our architecture is generic and can be used with heterogeneous wireless networks, we prove the validity of our approach in a lab prototype, by implementing our distributed mobility management mechanism on a set of OpenFlow-controlled IEEE 802.11 networks.