On evaluating different trends for virtualized and SDN-ready mobile network

Abstract

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is one of the key enablers for evolving mobile network architecture towards 5G. SDN involves the separation of control and data plane functions, which leads in the context of 5G, to consider the separation of the control and data plane functions of the different gateways of the Evolved Packet Core (EPC), namely Serving and Packet data Gateways (S and P-GW). Indeed, the envisioned solutions propose to separate the S/P-GW into two entities: the S/P-GW-C, which integrates the control plane functions; and the S/P-GW-U that handles the User Equipment (UE) data plane traffic. There are two major approaches to create and update user plane forwarding rules for such a partition: (i) considering an SDN controller for the S/P-GW-C (SDNEPC) or (ii) using a direct specific interface to control the S/P-GW-U (enhancedEPC). In this paper, we evaluate, using a testbed, those two visions against the classical virtual EPC (vEPC), where all the elements of the EPC are virtualized. Besides evaluating the capacity of the vEPC to manage and scale to UE requests, we compare the performances of the solutions in terms of the time needed to create the user data plane. The obtained results allow drawing very interesting remarks, which may help to dimension the vEPC's components as well as to improve the S/P-GW-U management procedure.