SDN-based Mobility Management Research Articles

Mobility management enhancement in smart cities using software defined networks

Achieving sustainability in cities relies on effective mobility management (MM) that serves current and future generations. It involves establishing an inclusive transportation system to address many issues, like traffic congestion, air pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions. Beyond environmental concerns, robust mobility management has social and economic advantages, fostering improved access to vital services like healthcare, education, and employment. Software-defined networking (SDN) presents a viable solution for enhancing MM within networks. Unlike traditional setups, SDN merges MM through a programmable control plane, streamlining network configurations and enabling features like handover, load balancing, and quality of service (QoS). The utilization of SDN technology extends to various facets of sustainable city networks, encompassing areas like network security, performance optimization, big data processing, energy efficiency, emergency management, carbon emissions reduction, intelligent services, and MM in vehicular networks. Despite the advantages of SDN-based mobility management, it's crucial to acknowledge the challenges and limitations posed by traditional MM methods that SDN aims to overcome. The paper explores SDN's potential in sustainable cities, focusing on how it can transform mobile device management, support various networking technologies, and evaluate the impact of SDN methods on existing MM systems, considering factors like scalability and compatibility. The paper asserts that SDN-based MM has substantial potential for promoting sustainable urban development. By centralizing control, adapting to changing conditions, and optimizing resource allocation, SDN can contribute to reduced energy consumption, lower carbon emissions, and more efficient urban mobility. It emphasizes the importance of addressing potential drawbacks to ensure successful implementation in sustainable cities.

SDMob: SDN-Based Mobility Management for IoT Networks

Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications are envisaged to evolve to support mobility of devices while providing quality of service in the system. To keep the connectivity of the constrained nodes upon topological changes, it is of vital importance to enhance the standard protocol stack, including the Routing Protocol for Lossy Low-power Networks (RPL), with accurate and real-time control decisions. We argue that devising a centralized mobility management solution based on a lightweight Software Defined Networking (SDN) controller provides seamless handoff with reasonable communication overhead. A centralized controller can exploit its global view of the network, computation capacity, and flexibility, to predict and significantly improve the responsiveness of the network. This approach requires the controller to be fed with the required input and to get involved in the distributed operation of the standard RPL. We present SDMob, which is a lightweight SDN-based mobility management architecture that integrates an external controller within a constrained IoT network. SDMob lifts the burden of computation-intensive filtering algorithms away from the resource-constrained nodes to achieve seamless handoffs upon nodes’ mobility. The current work extends our previous work, by supporting multiple mobile nodes, networks with a high density of anchors, and varying hop-distance from the controller, as well as harsh and realistic mobility patterns. Through analytical modeling and simulations, we show that SDMob outperforms the baseline RPL and the state-of-the-art ARMOR in terms of packet delivery ratio and end-to-end delay, with an adjustable and tolerable overhead. With SDMob, the network provides close to 100% packet delivery ratio (PDR) for a limited number of mobile nodes, and maintains sub-meter accuracy in localization under random mobility patterns and varying network topologies.

Mobility Management for Intro/Inter Domain Handover in Software-Defined Networks

To provide satisfactory Quality of Service (QoS) on the move, efficient mobility management is indispensable to provide mobile users with seamless and ubiquitous wireless connectivity. However, both the conventional centralized mobility architecture and the upcoming distributed mobility management face fundamental challenges such as sub-optimal routing, scalability, and so on. The emerging software-defined networking (SDN) architecture can efficiently manage network operations, and accordingly provides a new direction to address the challenges in mobility management. In this paper, we propose an SDN-based Mobility Management (SDN-MM) scheme to support seamless Intro/Inter domain handover with route optimization. SDN-MM decouples mobility management and packet forwarding functions by installing route optimizing and mobility control logics in an SDN controller, but exempting it from traffic redirecting. In SDN-MM, a comprehensive set of signaling operations are designed in order to provide transparent and efficient mobility support for ongoing sessions in each handover scenario, which prevents packet loss and tunneling overhead, and accordingly provide improved QoS to mobile users. For data communications, an SDN controller in SDN-MM pre-calculates the optimal end-to-end route before a handover, and decides whether to migrate traffic to the route by balancing the performance gain and the signaling overhead, which greatly improves bandwidth resource utilization. Finally, we develop a novel analytical model to evaluate the performance of SDN-MM, including signaling overhead, handover latency, and packet delivery cost. The simulation results have been provided to demonstrate that the proposed SDN-MM can greatly improve handover performance and maintain high resource utilization efficiency as well.

사물 인터넷 환경에서의 소프트웨어 정의 네트워크 기반 이동성 관리

사물 인터넷 환경에서의 소프트웨어 정의 네트워크 기반 이동성 관리

A hierarchical mobility management scheme based on software defined networking

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a new paradigm which allows the network devices to be more programmable and easily controlled. SDN can be applied to improve the flexibility and performance of mobile networks. As a key problem of SDN-based mobile networks, the mobility management still cannot simultaneously support various different scenarios and has the limitations of high signaling cost and handover delay. In order to overcome these drawbacks of existing related protocols, we propose a SDN-based mobility management scheme named H-SMM by constructing a hierarchical architecture in control plane to support intra-domain and inter-domain handover scenarios at the same time. Then we design handover procedures to simplify intra-domain handover and optimize inter-domain handover respectively. In addition, the communication initiation procedure is also provided. Qualitative analysis shows H-SMM is an overall mobility management scheme. Calculative analysis indicates that H-SMM has lower signaling cost. Simulation results illustrate that the handover delay and the end to end delay of first packet in communication initiation are lower than contrast schemes. Moreover, our evaluation also shows that the above performance advantages of H-SMM will be more evident with the increasing of domain numbers and distance between domains.