Distributed Mobility Management Approaches Research Articles

Efficient Mobility Management in Mobile Edge Computing Networks: Joint Handover and Service Migration

Mobile edge computing (MEC) has been envisioned as an essential technology for latency-critical applications by providing computing services in close proximity to mobile users. Bringing MEC to come into practice, how to support user mobility remains challenging. In addition to seeking a thorny trade-off between service latency and migration cost, both interactions in space and time exist in mobility management, which requires collaboration among users and perfect prior knowledge, including user mobility and network information. In this paper, we propose an efficient mobility management framework for MEC networks, in which mobility management is operated centered around users’ performance and cost, while radio access and computing service provision are loosely coupled. With a loosely coupled design, the proposed framework exhibits more flexibility and incurs higher complexity. Focusing on multi-user and multi-cell MEC networks, this joint control problem is formulated to maximize the long-term total utility accounting for the service delay and migration cost. Considering the exponential complexity, a distributed mobility management approach is developed, which combines game theory and user-oriented deep reinforcement learning to deal with the interactions in space and time. Simulation results show the efficiency and scalability of the proposed approach.

Analytical and Experimental Evaluation of a Novel Mechanism to Improve the Control Plane in Next-Generation Mobile Networks

With the continuous development of mobile communications and the Internet of Things technology, the enhanced network performance can be seen as one of the major challenges in the fourth industrial revolution context, where new services and applications with strict performance requirements have emerged, such as driverless vehicles, smart cities, factories, and manufacturing, among others. These new services and applications also drive growth of the data traffic, which is increasing exponentially. Thus, in mobile network environments, industry and academia are proposing new mechanisms to overcome the traffic bottlenecks and reduce the signaling overhead that affects current networks. Centralized Mobility Management solutions are prone to several problems such as the aforementioned signaling overhead or scalability issues. To overcome these limitations, Distributed Mobility Management approaches are being considered. In this paper, an analytical cost model and experimental evaluation will be developed for evaluating the performance of the Distributed Mobility Management implementations. Furthermore, a new approach will be proposed to improve network performance.

A flexible IPv6 mobility management architecture for SDN‐based 5G mobile networks

AbstractWith the advent of increasingly diverse services, applications, and use cases, the 5G mobility environment is expected to be highly heterogeneous. The distributed mobility management (DMM) is emerging as a promising approach for 5G, which provides decentralized handover and traffic management at the edge of the network. However, in order to meet the disparate mobility needs, the DMM process requires flexible design considerations. This paper presents a novel mobile node (MN) centered, software‐defined networking (SDN)–based flexible mobility management architecture, named adaptive multimode mobility management (A3M), which can adaptively operate in multiple modes. The proposed A3M architecture incorporates a novel handover mode selection phase among the traditional handover phases during which a suitable mode of handover operation is evaluated. This makes the A3M handover process adaptable to the varying mobility requirements of the MN and enables it to provide differentiated handover management for MNs with different mobility profiles. The performance analysis of A3M shows that it offers optimal handover performance in terms of primary handover performance metrics such as session disruption delay, packet losses, and signaling costs, compared to the popular network‐based DMM approaches.

SR-DMM: A SDN-Based DMM Solution For Future Mobile Networks

The exponential growth in the number of mobile subscribers, as well as the data traffic generated by them is showing a major challenge in wireless Internet. Existing mobile networks are starting to be insufficient in meeting this demand, in part due to their inflexible and expensive equipment as well as complex and non-agile control plane. In this context, in which the heterogeneity on the access is even more extended, the mobility support becomes more crucial. Thus, the mobility management mechanisms need to evolve to fit with the cutting-edge technologies that are going to rule next generation mobile networks. A key enabler to 5G will be SDN (Software-Defined Networking), which brings a natural solution to decouple the network control plane from the data plane, allowing higher flexibility and programmability to the network. Based on SDN and following the recommendations of the DMM (Distributed Mobility Management) approach, this article presents the SR-DMM solution (SDN Redirection DMM), a mobility management mechanism that takes full advantages of the softwarization capabilities of the network. This proposal avoids the use of IP-IP tunnels and it adds the dynamic flow management capability provided by SDN. In order to analyse the performance of SR-DMM, an analytical model is developed to compare it with NB-DMM (Network-based DMM), one of the main DMM solutions. Additionally, SR-DMM performance is also evaluated with an experimental testbed. The results allow to measure the handover latency in real scenarios and numerical investigations, also shows that SR-DMM achieves better efficiency in terms of signalling and routing cost than NB-DMM solution.

Performance Evaluation of Distributed Mobility Management Protocols: Limitations and Solutions for Future Mobile Networks

Mobile Internet data traffic has experienced an exponential growth over the last few years due to the rise of demanding multimedia content and the increasing number of mobile devices. Seamless mobility support at the IP level is envisioned as a key architectural requirement in order to deal with the ever-increasing demand for data and to efficiently utilize a plethora of different wireless access networks. Current efforts from both industry and academia aim to evolve the mobility management protocols towards a more distributed operation to tackle shortcomings of fully centralized approaches. However, distributed solutions face several challenges that can result in lower performance which might affect real-time and multimedia applications. In this paper, we conduct an analytical and simulated evaluation of the main centralized and proposed Distributed Mobility Management (DMM) solutions. Our results show that, in some scenarios, when users move at high speed and/or when the mobile node is running long-lasting applications, the DMM approaches incur high signaling cost and long handover latency.

A Comparative Study on PMIPv6 and Partially DMM Network Architecture

With the increasing volumes of mobile data traffic and massive increase in the number of interconnected devices, especially on demand for “imperceptible latency” with tactile internet, and nearly 100% reliability with Internet of Thing service [1], IMT-2020 (5G) provides a Fifth-Generation (5G) system to meet new and unprecedented demands. Along with these objectives, distributed mobility management (DMM) has recently emerged as a new paradigm to design a flat and flexible mobility architecture, allowing traffic to be broken out locally closer to the edge (i.e., offloading the network core) and exploiting the use of different gateways for traffic with different connectivity and mobility requirements. Apparently, the DMM approach is a suitable candidate for mobility management in future 5G dense deployments [2]. A number of distributed mobility management schemes have been proposed in literature. For the requirements and DMM network architecture issue, Liu et al. [35] defined the requirements and provided a flattened 3GPP network mechanism, while Chan `et al. [6] introduced several SIPTO/LIPA scenarios based on DMM. For the Mobile Node’s (MN) location management issue, Giust et al. [2,7] and Bernardos et al. [8] proposed a method by querying the Central Mobility Database (CMD) and Software Define Network (SDN) and Domain Name System (DNS) server to acquire the MN’s location information. Kim et al. [9] and Jung et al. [10] proposed a multicast or point-to-point search mechanism to find an MN’s location. For the MN’s data flow issue, Sun et al. [11] presented a novel solution that supported different IP data flow by multiple IP interface. However, those proposed mechanisms did not give a specific implementation mechanism and feasibility analysis. For the performance analysis issue, Shin et al. [12] analyzed the simulation data which showed DMM mechanism is more suitable for sensitive delay and tolerance than Proxy MIPv6. Giust et al. [13] and Kim et al. [14-15] showed signal control and data transmission cost analysis. However, those performances are all cost-based analyses, which are short of the comprehensive and systematic study. 1

Processing loads analysis of distributed mobility management and SIP-based reachability

Currently, various efforts are being performed on specifying distributed mobility management (DMM) for IPv6 mobile networks. DMM is expected to eliminate the limitations of the current IPv6 mobility protocols and to cope with the rapid increase in mobile data traffic. In current DMM approaches, the mobility anchoring is distributed at the access router level and the mobile node changes dynamically the mobility anchor for new sessions. Although such approaches avoid any network bottleneck and allow optimal routing in most cases, they lack reachability support since the mobile node has no permanent IPv6 address. In this paper, we consider one of the DMM approaches, dynamic mobility anchoring, and study the usage of session initiation protocol (SIP) for providing reachability support. After defining different SIP-based location update modes, we carry out a comparative cost analysis considering new performance metrics related to the processing loads at each network entity. We consider the location update loads on the location server as well as the context, signaling, and tunneling loads on a mobility anchor. We investigate the different modes in several scenarios, allowing the mobile network operator to adopt the preferred mode depending on their architecture.

Design and performance evaluation of distributed mobility management schemes for network mobility

Distributed Mobility Management (DMM) is a current alternative paradigm for developing IP mobility management schemes to address the centralised mobility management problems in existing IP mobility management schemes. This is to allow these schemes to cope with the current increase in the number of mobile users and mobile data traffic volume, as well as the trend in the mobile Internet towards a flat architecture. To date, schemes׳ development based on DMM approach is still at preliminary stages in the IETF, and there is no current standard in place. In this paper, we develop network-based DMM schemes for the Network Mobility (NEMO). The schemes are developed for non-nested and nested NEMO scenarios – with the goal of mitigating the sub-optimal routing, high packet overhead and packet delivery latency, especially in a nested NEMO scenario, due to the employment of a centralized mobility management approach in NEMO. Additionally, the proposed scheme improves the packet delivery and location update (i.e., binding update) costs. The paper presents in detail the schemes’ design, operation mechanism, and the performance evaluation (through analytical and simulation in ns-2). Both the analytical and simulation results show that the proposed schemes yield a significant improvement – in terms of reducing packet overhead and packet delivery latency, as well as binding update and packet delivery costs.

Distributed mobility management for future 5G networks: overview and analysis of existing approaches

The ever-increasing demand of mobile Internet traffic is pushing operators to look for solutions to increase the available bandwidth per user and per unit of area. At the same time, they need to reduce the load in the core network at a reasonable cost in their future 5G deployments. Today's trend points to the deployment of extremely dense networks in order to provide ubiquitous connectivity at high data rates. However, this is hard to couple with the current mobile networks' architecture, which is heavily centralized, posing difficult challenges when coping with the foreseen explosion of mobile data. Additionally, future 5G networks will exhibit disparate types of services, posing different connectivity requirements. Distributed mobility management is emerging as a valid framework to design future mobile network architectures, taking into account the requirements for large traffic in the core and the rise of extremely dense wireless access networks. In this article, we discuss the adoption of a distributed mobility management approach for mobile networks, and analyze the operation of the main existing solutions proposed so far, including a first practical evaluation based on experiments with real Linux-based prototype implementations.

Studying the integration of distributed and dynamic schemes in the mobility management

The raise of demanding multimedia content and the increasing number of mobile devices originated a rapid growth of mobile Internet traffic, which is expected to continue increasing with an exponential behavior in the next years. In order to cope with this rapid increase, service providers are already developing new strategies, such as the selective traffic offloading through the wireless local area networks. Moreover, a new trend is to flatten the network architectures for mobile Internet, and hence, IP mobility management protocols need to be adapted for such evolution. However, current mobility management models rely on a centralized entity, called mobility anchor, which routes the whole data traffic and manages all bindings of its users. With the increase of the mobile Internet traffic and the number of users’ devices, such centralized models encounter several barriers for scalability, security and performance, such as a single point of failure, longer traffic delays and higher signaling loads. Hence, we study the distribution of mobility management based on the decoupling of functionalities into: handover management, location management and data management. We evaluate distinct approaches to distribute the mobility functionalities closer to the end-user. We demonstrate, through analytical and simulation results, that distributed mobility management approaches improve the data delivery when compared with current centralized models.

Distributed IP mobility management from the perspective of the IETF: motivations, requirements, approaches, comparison, and challenges

The recent explosion of mobile Internet traffic is accelerating the evolution of mobile network architectures toward flat architectures with all IP backhaul support. IP mobility support protocols are thus required to be adopted in such mobile network architectures. Accordingly, the IETF Distributed Mobility Management (DMM) working group was recently chartered to address such architectural changes with rapidly increasing mobile Internet usages. Unlike existing IP mobility support protocols, DMM protocols being considered at the IETF aim at distributing mobile Internet traffic in an optimal way while not relying on centrally deployed mobility anchors. In this article, we first discuss motivations and requirements of DMM. We then present two different possible approaches: host-based and network-based DMM approaches. Furthermore, comprehensive comparison results are provided. Finally, we discuss challenges in developments of DMM protocols.

Distributed mobility management for efficient video delivery over all-IP mobile networks: Competing approaches

The recent proliferation of multimedia mobile devices and a variety of mobile applications are generating an enormous amount of data traffic over mobile networks. The key driver of the mobile traffic growth is mobile video. Currently, mobile networks are evolving to the 4G system, which has a flatter architecture and provides all-IP-based mobile broadband service. In all-IP mobile networks, IP mobility management is a key function that allows mobile nodes to continue their communications even when their point of attachment to the IP network changes. Existing mobile networks employ a centralized mobility management scheme where all intelligence is concentrated in one end-point system, rather than being distributed through the internet. However, this cannot satisfactorily support mobile videos, which demand a large volume of data and often require QoS such as session continuity and low delay. This motivates distributed mobility management (DMM) solutions that can efficiently handle mobile video traffic. In this article, we survey different approaches for DMM in standards development organizations such as IETF and 3GPP, and also in research organizations. We focus on three different DMM approaches that are currently being considered by the IETF: PMIPv6-based, MIPv6-based, and routing-based DMMs. We provide a qualitative analysis to compare the three DMM approaches and discuss which DMM approaches are more suitable for efficient mobile video delivery.