SDN Based Control Plane Extensions for Mobility Management Improvement in Next Generation ETArch Networks

Abstract

Mobility support is a requirement in next generation networks. The entity Title Architecture (ETArch) is a clean-slate network architecture that uses a naming and addressing scheme based on the Title and has a natural match with Software Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm. ETArch aims at satisfying applications requirements such as mobility. On a previous work, we demonstrated the use of ETArch in order to keep ongoing sessions during handover with no packet loss. The initial approach however, performed the handover without taking into account QoS guarantees during the selection of new Point of Attachments (PoAs). This work proposes an extension to the legacy ETArch Mobility Manager, called Quality-oriented Mobility Management Approach (QoMMA), to support a quality-oriented handover management. This extension enables a network-initiated mobility control that improves resources allocation and execute a quality-oriented access point selection. The QoMMA also performs a mobility load balancing in order to maximize admissions of mobile sessions in conditions of congestion. The evaluations were carried out on a testbed that considered real events, and provided evidence that the proposal outperforms legacy ETArch mobility control functionalities.