Tunneling Overhead Research Articles

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.

MobQoS: Mobility-Aware and QoS-Driven SDN Framework for Autonomous Vehicles

An intelligent transportation system (ITS) is a cyber physical system (CPS) that is well recognized due to its distinctive applications such as passenger safety, enhanced traffic efficiency, and infotainment services. However, very recently, these CPSs have witnessed a rapid increase in the number of autonomous vehicles (AVs), and the count is expected to increase significantly in the years to come. Under such scenarios, the conventional ITS solutions would fall short due to numerous technical limitations such as reduced flexibility, poor connectivity, limited scalability, and lack of adequate intelligence. In this direction, the cloud computing paradigm would also lag behind in meeting the following expected challenges: high mobility, minimal latency, realtime services, and high quality of service (QoS). Software defined networking (SDN) and edge computing (EC) are expected to be promising solutions for modern ITS. SDN allows efficient management of networks by virtue of its decoupled data and control planes. Moreover, EC is an extension of cloud computing that allows data processing, storage, and management at the edge of the network. Thus, these promising paradigms can address the network and data processing challenges of AV networks in rea time. Further, distributed mobility management (DMM) with improvised routing capabilities in the considered setup can bring added advantages in the form of zero tunneling overhead, full-fledged control of flow table entries, QoS-driven routing decisions, and efficient interplay between the edge and the cloud. Keeping in view the potential benefits of SDN, EC, and DMM in future AV networks, this work presents a composite framework with a distributed SDN-DMM approach in ITS ecosystems. Further, conventional DMM has been improved by stacking the Optimized Routing Decision module on it. This coupling yields a mobility-aware and QoS-driven (MobQoS) SDN framework for AVs that handles both the mobility and QoS challenges of the underlying vehicular networks. Additionally, it is also designed to handle the interplay between the edge and the cloud in an optimized manner using the Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithm based on Decomposition (MOEA/D). Numerical comparisons depict that the proposed MobQoS outperforms the existing state of the art in terms of overall communication latency and bandwidth utilization. The performance assessment has been carried out using NS-3 and SUMO wherein an overall improvement of 15.95 percent has been reported in terms of end-to-end delay.

Performance and Energy Conservation of 3GPP IFOM Protocol for Dual Connectivity in Heterogeneous LTE–WLAN Network

For the 5th Generation networks, Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) is considering standardization of various solutions for traffic aggregation using licensed and unlicensed spectrum, to meet the rising data demands. IP Flow Mobility (IFOM) is a multi-access connectivity solution/protocol standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force and 3GPP in Release 10. It enables concurrent access for an User Equipment (UE) to Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets) such as Long Term Evolution (LTE) and IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN). IFOM enabled UEs (IeUs) have multiple interfaces to connect to HetNets. They can have concurrent flows with different traffic types over these networks and can seamlessly switch the flows from one network to the other. In this paper, we focus on two objectives. First is to investigate the performance parameters, e.g. throughput, latency, tunnelling overhead, packet loss, energy cost, etc. of IeUs in HetNets of LTE and WLAN. We have proposed a novel mechanism to maximize the throughput of IeUs achieving a significant throughput gain with low latency for the IeUs. We have explored further and observed a throughput-energy trade-off for low data rate flows. To address this, we also propose a smart energy efficient and throughput optimization algorithm for the IeUs, resulting in a substantial reduction in energy cost, while maintaining the high throughput at lower latency and satisfying the Quality of Service requirements of the IeUs.

A Future Mobile Packet Core Network Based on Ip-In-Ip Protocol

The current Evolved Packet Core (EPC) 4th generation (4G) mobile network architecture features complicated control plane protocols and requires expensive equipment. Data delivery in the mobile packet core is performed based on a centralized mobility anchor between eNode B (eNB) elements and the network gateways. The mobility anchor is performed based on General Packet Radio Service tunnelling protocol (GTP), which has numerous drawbacks, including high tunnelling overhead and suboptimal routing between mobile devices on the same network. To address these challenges, here we describe new mobile core architecture for future mobile networks. The proposed scheme is based on IP encapsulated within IP (IP-in-IP) for mobility management and data delivery. In this scheme, the core network functions via layer 3 switching (L3S), and data delivery is implemented based on IP-in-IP routing, thus eliminating the GTP tunnelling protocol. For handover between eNB elements located near to one another, we propose the creation of a tunnel that maintains data delivery to mobile devices until the new eNB element updates the route with the gateway, which prevents data packet loss during handover. For this, we propose Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE) tunnelling protocol. We describe the results of numerical analyses and simulation results showing that the proposed network core architecture provides superior performance compared with the current 4G architecture in terms of handover delay, tunnelling overhead and total transmission delay.

Permeation grouting and excavation at Victoria station, London

Paid area link 6 (Pal6) underpass, a crucial tunnel connection of London Underground's Victoria station upgrade project, was engineered within notoriously difficult sub-artesian granular River Terrace Deposits (RTD) immediately below the Victorian-age District and Circle line masonry tunnel, a structure highly sensitive to ground displacements. Due to the proximity of the overlying operational railway, the consequences of ground movement were of very high risk. Historic tunnel construction in the heterogeneous RTD had limited success with permeation grouting, and face losses and instabilities occurred. For the case of Pal6, the railway tunnel overhead magnified the difficulties. Permeation grouting still remained the most feasible stabilising option, but only with significant improvements in both grouting technique and grout types. A low-risk tunnelled solution, using a bespoke and sophisticated construction approach, enabled safe continuous excavation within the severely restricted structural constraints. Successful tunnelling demanded: complete sequence recovery of the RTD for accurate soil characterisation for design of the grouting system; caution with permeation grouting; appropriate grout selection to promote permeation without claquage (uncontrolled fracturing by grout with its consequent irregular distribution), thus precisely targeting discrete zones; uniform treatment; and observational control by monitoring real-time ground movements.

Fast Rerouting Against Multi-Link Failures Without Topology Constraint

Multi-link failures may incur heavy packet loss and degrade the network performance. Fast rerouting has been proposed to address this issue by enabling routing protections. However, the effectiveness and efficiency issues of fast rerouting are not well addressed. In particular, the protection performance of existing approaches is not satisfactory even if the overhead is high, and topology constraints need to be met for the approaches to achieve a complete protection. To optimize the efficiency, we first answer the question that whether label-free routing can provide a complete protection against arbitrary multi-link failures in any networks. We propose a model for interface-specific-routing which can be seen as a general label-free routing. We analyze the conditions under which a multi-link failure will induce routing loops. And then, we present that there exist some networks in which no interface-specific-routing (ISR) can be constructed to protect the routing against any $k$ -link failures ( $k \geq 2$ ). Then, we propose a tunneling on demand (TOD) approach, which covers most failures with ISR, and activate tunneling only when failures cannot be detoured around by ISR. We develop algorithms to compute ISR properly so as to minimize the number of activated tunnels, and compute the protection tunnels if necessary. We prove that TOD can protect routing against any single-link failures and dual-link failures. We evaluate TOD by simulations with real-world topologies. The results show that TOD can achieve a near 100% protection ratio with small tunneling overhead for multi-link failures, making a better tradeoff than the state-of-the-art label-based approaches.

Optimized Routing Information Exchange in Hybrid IPv4-IPv6 Network using OSPFV3 & EIGRPv6

IPv6 is the next generation internet protocol which is gradually replacing the IPv4. IPv6 offers larger address space, simpler header format, efficient routing, better QoS and built-in security mechanisms. The migration from IPv4 to IPv6 cannot be attained in a short span of time. The main issue is compatibility and interoperability between the two protocols. Therefore, both the protocols are likely to coexist for a long time. Usually, tunneling protocols are deployed over hybrid IPv4-IPv6 networks to offer end-to-end IPv6 connectivity. Many routing protocols are used for IPv4 and IPv6. In this paper, researchers analyzed the optimized routing information exchange of two routing protocols (OSPFv3 & EIGRPv6) in hybrid IPv4-IPv6 network. Experimental results show that OSPFv3 performs better than EIGRPv6 in terms of most of the parameters i.e. convergence time, RTT, response time, tunnel overhead, protocol traffic statistics, CPU and memory utilization.

An architecture of IPTV service based on PVR-Micro data center and PMIPv6 in cloud computing

This paper proposes An Architecture of IPTV Services based on PVR-Micro Data Center and PMIPv6 in Cloud Computing. The proposed architecture addresses important problems exist in normal PMIPv6 (Proxy mobile IPv6) environment which is not today addressed by normal PMIPv6. The first issue is user devices secure authentication, registration and fast handover in both inter-domain/intra-domain of PMIPv6. The second issues is multimedia delivery in inter-domain/intra-domain of PMIPv6. The third issue is tunneling overhead in inter-domain/intra. Today smart devices are mobile and user use them to access the internet from anywhere at any time using different connection method while they are traveling. Providing security measures such as user device authentication, registration as well as hand over requires different security measures and configuration in inter-domain/intra-domain of PMIPv6. Furthermore we provide new method to reduce tunneling overhead by allowing multimedia content to be delivered from many different Micro data center as well as Mega data center by using their own unique addresses to create tunneling to transfer multimedia content. Our goal is not only to reduce authentication delay, handover delay and reduce signaling cost using the intelligent utilization of AAA server (Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting Server), binding cache entry (BCE), and proxy notification update (PNU) and proxy notification acknowledgment (PNA) but also to provide fast delivery of multimedia content. Our result shows better performance when compare with normal PMIPv6. We used network simulator 3 (NS3) to generate our experiment result.

Enhanced Mobility Management Scheme in PMIP-SAE-Based Mobile Networks

In the existing PMIP scheme for SAE-based mobile networks such as LTE, data delivery is performed by GTP between eNB and S-GW, and also between eNBs in X2-based handover, while GRE protocol is used between S-GW and P-GW. However, the use of GTP tunnels between eNB and S-GW and between eNBs tends to induce large tunneling overhead for packets. Existing scheme also tends to incur large registration delay and route update delay after handover. To overcome the drawbacks, we propose an enhanced mobility management scheme for SAE based mobile networks. In the proposed scheme, we combine two user plane nodes, S-GW, and P-GW, as a single entity, and make it function as LMA. Further, each eNB works as a MAG of PMIP. The GRE tunnel is used between eNB/MAG and S-GW/P-GW/LMA, and also between eNB/MAGs, instead of GTP. Differently from the existing scheme, target eNB/MAG exchanges PBU and PBA messages directly with the S-GW/P-GW/LMA in the route update operation after handover, not through MME. Numerical analysis shows that the proposed scheme reduces all the tunneling overhead, registration delay, and route update delay after handover significantly.

TRILL-Based Mobile Packet Core Network for 5G Mobile Communication Systems

In the Evolved Packet Core (EPC) network architecture for 4G mobile communication systems, the data delivery is performed based on the GPRS tunneling protocol (GTP) between eNodeB and the gateways. However, the use of GTP tunnels may give some drawbacks, which include large tunneling overhead for packet, non-optimal data paths between Mobile hosts within the same network, and frequent tunnel updates for every handover. In this paper, we propose a new architecture for mobile core network in the emerging 5G mobile systems. The proposed mobile core network architecture is based on the Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links (TRILL) protocol for data delivery and mobility management, named TRILL-based Packet Core (TPC). In the proposed architecture, each eNodeB will function as a Routing Bridge (RB) of TRILL. The data delivery operations are performed between RBs by using TRILL switching mechanisms, rather than using GTP tunnels. The proposed architecture uses Mobility Management Entity (MME) to manage the mapping information between identifier (IP address of user equipment) and locator (MAC address of RB). For handover of user equipment, the location of users will be updated with MME. By numerical analysis, it is shown that the proposed 5G-TPC architecture can give more performance benefits than the 4G-EPC architecture in terms of data tunneling overhead, total transmission delay and route update delay after handover .

Dynamic anchor points selection for mobility management in Software Defined Networks

Today consumers want to stay connected to networking services anywhere and at anytime. Managing consumers׳ mobility to ensure session and service continuity in efficient and effective manner is more and more challenging due to the increasing number of mobile devices and their high mobility pattern. Different solutions have been proposed in the literature to tackle this problem. They are based on a single mobility management point, called mobility anchor. Unfortunately, most of these solutions suffer from long packets delivery delay and high overhead ratio. In this work, we propose a new mobility management called Software Defined Mobility Management (SDMM) based on the Software Defined Network (SDN) paradigm. The proposed solution is network based, where the mobility is managed by network entities. In opposite to existing approaches, the anchor point is dynamically selected for each flow by a virtual function implemented at the top of the SDN controller which has a global view of the network. The main advantages of our approach are threefold: first reducing packet delivery delay, second reducing the handover latency and third minimizing the tunneling overhead.

Performance analysis of fast handover for proxy Mobile IPv6

In Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6), any involvement by the Mobile Node (MN) is not required, so that any tunneling overhead can be removed from over-the-air. However, during the PMIPv6 handover process, there still exists a period when the MN is unable to send or receive packets because of PMIPv6 protocol operations, suffering from handover latency and data loss. Thus, to reduce the handover latency and data loss in PMIPv6, Fast Handover for PMIPv6 (PFMIPv6) is being standardized in the IETF. Nevertheless, PFMIPv6 has a few weaknesses: (1) handover initiation can be false, resulting in the PFMIPv6 handover process done so far becoming unnecessary. (2) Extra signaling is introduced in setting up an IP-in-IP tunnel between the serving and the new Mobile Access Gateways (MAGs). Therefore, in this paper, we present our study on the protocol overhead and performance aspects of PFMIPv6 in comparison with PMIPv6. We quantify the signaling overhead and the enhanced handover latency and data loss by conducting a thorough analysis of the performance aspects. The analysis is very meaningful to obtain important insights on how PFMIPv6 improves the handover performance over PMIPv6, especially in a highway vehicular traffic scenario where Base Stations (BSs)/Access Points (APs) can be placed in one dimensional space and MN’s movements are quasi one-dimensional, so that the degree of certainty for an anticipated handover is increased. Further, our analytical study is verified by simulation results.

Pinball Routing Elimination Algorithm for Multihomed Mobile Network

A solution of the pinball routing problem in a multihomed mobile network is proposed in the present work. All the communication to and from the mobile network node in a nested mobile network passes through the tunnel between mobile router and its home agent as mentioned in network mobility route optimization problem statement. Such problem is formally known as pinball routing problem. But in the present scheme the communication to and from the mobile network node may or may not pass through the home agents of mobile routers at the higher level of the nested network depending upon the network mobility. Such consideration helps to minimize delay due to pinball routing effect. Moreover in the present work direct communication is proposed if both the source node and the destination node lie inside the same nested mobile network. The proposed scheme is the combination of route optimization algorithm and pinball routing elimination algorithm in a nested multi-homed mobile network. The route optimization algorithm selects an optimal route inside the mobile network of the source node. The pinball routing elimination algorithm selects the pinball eliminated route from the mobile network to the destination node. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated on the basis of tunneling overhead, end to end packet delay and fragmentation using ENEMO_SIM simulator. Results based on a detailed performance evaluation study are also presented to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed scheme.

Network Performance Evaluation of Tunneling Mechanism

Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is introduced to replace the services offered by the Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) and it is aimed to improve the current provisions as well as providing better services to the Internet's users. Several types of IPv6 transition mechanisms have been developed to migrate the IPv4 technology to IPv6 technology. Although all transition mechanisms have the same objective, the process necessitates compliance with their respective capabilities. This paper focuses on the evaluation of the transition mechanisms namely Tunneling Mechanism in terms of data transmission. The evaluation is based on an Experimental work that is conducted on a controlled testbed environment. User-to-user network performance software is used to obtain the throughput, round trip time and tunneling overhead for TCP and UDP transmission protocol. The transition mechanism performance results are then compared with the performance of native IPv4 and IPv6 environment. © 2012 Asian Network for Scientific Information.

PNEMO: A Network-Based Localized Mobility Management Protocol for Mobile Networks

Network mobility has attracted large attention to provide vehicles such as trains with Internet connectivity. NEMO Basic Support Protocol (NEMO-BS) supports network mobility. However, through our experiment using a train in service, NEMO-BS shows that the handover latency becomes very large if the signaling messages are lost due to instability of the wireless link during handover. There are several proposals such as N-PMIPv6 and N-NEMO to support network mobility based on network-based localized mobility management. However, these proposals have problems such as large tunneling overhead and transmission of the control messages for handover on the wireless link. This paper proposes PNEMO, a network-based localized mobility management protocol for mobile networks. In PNEMO, mobility management is basically handled in the wired network so that the signaling messages are not transmitted on the wireless link when handover occurs. This makes handover stable even if the wireless link is unstable during handover. PNEMO uses a single tunneling even if the mobile network is nested. PNEMO is implemented in Linux. The measured performance shows that the handover latency is almost constant even if the wireless link is unstable when handover occurs, and that the overhead of PNEMO is negligible in comparison with NEMO-BS.

Resource-efficient network mobility support in Proxy Mobile IPv6 domain

The basic standard protocol for supporting network mobility (NEMO) (i.e., NEMO-BSP specified by IETF) introduces several performance problems, such as multiple tunneling overhead and packet delivery latency, because it exploits mobile IPv6 (MIPv6), which was proposed for host mobility. To improve the basic NEMO solution, two network-based NEMO approaches, rNEMO and N-PMIPv6, have been proposed. The rNEMO is able to reduce significant packet tunneling overhead. The N-PMIPv6, on the other hand, reduces location update cost, but it leads to packet tunneling overhead. Thus, they commonly waste network resources in both wired and especially wireless network. No efficient and practical solutions for minimizing both the location update overhead and packet tunneling overhead have been presented until now. This situation motivated us to propose a resource-efficient network mobility scheme (RENEMO), reducing resource utilization required for network mobility support. We show that the proposed RENEMO outperforms both rNEMO and N-PMIPv6 in terms of network resource.

DRO: domain-based route optimization scheme for nested mobile networks

The network mobility (NEMO) basic support protocol is designed to support NEMO management, and to ensure communication continuity between nodes in mobile networks. However, in nested mobile networks, NEMO suffers from the pinball routing problem, which results in long packet transmission delays. To solve the problem, we propose a domain-based route optimization (DRO) scheme that incorporates a domain-based network architecture and ad hoc routing protocols for route optimization. DRO also improves the intra-domain handoff performance, reduces the convergence time during route optimization, and avoids the out-of-sequence packet problem. A detailed performance analysis and simulations were conducted to evaluate the scheme. The results demonstrate that DRO outperforms existing mechanisms in terms of packet transmission delay (i.e., better route-optimization), intra-domain handoff latency, convergence time, and packet tunneling overhead.

An Adaptive Network Mobility Support Protocol in Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 Networks

The network mobility (NEMO) basic support protocol provides collective mobility for a group of nodes in vehicular area networks. Since the NEMO basic support protocol always performs the same operations, regardless of a mobile network's characteristics, it cannot achieve optimal performance. We propose an adaptive NEMO support protocol based on hierarchical mobile IPv6. The proposed protocol jointly optimizes binding update (BU) traffic and tunneling overhead by employing the adaptive BU strategy, depending on the session-to-mobility ratio (SMR). Specifically, both the mobile router (MR) and the visiting mobile nodes (VMNs) configure two care-of-addresses: 1) on-link care-of-address (LCoA) and 2) regional care-of-address (RCoA). If the SMR is lower than a predefined threshold, the MR and VMNs perform RCoA and LCoA BU procedures to their home agents (HAs), respectively. Otherwise, LCoA and RCoA BU procedures are conducted by the MR and VMNs, respectively. Via analytical models, we evaluate the performance of the adaptive NEMO support protocol against other NEMO support protocols and derive the optimal SMR threshold. Numerical results demonstrate that the adaptive NEMO support protocol is a valuable solution for promising NEMO applications.

A comparative performance analysis on Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 and Proxy Mobile IPv6

This paper presents comparative results on Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 and Proxy Mobile IPv6. The two mobility support protocols have similar hierarchical mobility management architectures but there are, however, clearly different perceptions: Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 has specific properties of a host-based mobility support protocol, whereas Proxy Mobile IPv6 is based on a network-based mobility support protocol. Thus, it is important to reveal their mobility characteristics and performance impact factors. In this paper, a cost based evaluation model is developed that evaluates the location update cost, the packet delivery cost, and the wireless power consumption cost based on the protocol operations used. Then, the numerical results are presented in where impacts of the various system parameters are evaluated. The results demonstrate that Proxy Mobile IPv6 always outperforms Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 due to its ability to avoid the mobility signaling sent by the mobile host, and its reduced tunneling overhead during communications with other nodes.

Localized Proxy-MIPv6 with Route Optimization in IP-Based Networks

Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) is designed not only to avoid tunneling overhead over the air but also to manage the mobility of hosts that are not equipped with any mobility management software. However, PMIPv6 leads to increasing signaling cost as mobile nodes move frequently because the protocol is based on the global mobility management protocol. In this letter we propose Localized PMIPν6 with Route Optimization (LPMIPv6-RO). Our numerical analysis shows that the proposed scheme outperforms previously proposed mobility protocols in terms of both signaling and packet delivery cost.