Applying SDN/OpenFlow in Virtualized LTE to Support Distributed Mobility Management (DMM)

Abstract

Distributed Mobility Management (DMM) is a mobility management solution, where the mobility anchors are distributed instead of being centralized. The use of DMM can be applied in cloud-based (virtualized) Long Term Evolution (LTE) mobile network environments to (1) provide session continuity to users across personal, local, and wide area networks without interruption and (2) support traffic redirection when a virtualized LTE entity like a virtualized Packet Data Network Gateway (P-GW) running on an virtualization platform is migrated to another virtualization platform and the on-going sessions supported by this P-GW need to be maintained. In this paper we argue that the enabling technology that can efficiently be used for supporting DMM in virtualized LTE systems is the Software Defined Networking (SDN)/OpenFlow technology.