Virtualization of cellular network EPC gateways based on a scalable SDN architecture

The gateways in mobile cellular networks are capable to handle the traffic from millions of subscribers at the same time, while providing high availability guarantee. Such entities are not only expensive, but also inflexible in terms of system deployment and maintenance. In this work, we investigate the feasibilities to virtualize gateway entities used in the Long Term Evolution (LTE) Evolved Packet Core (EPC). We propose a novel PDN Gateway (PGW) architecture, which decouples the control plane from the user plane by using Software Defined Network (SDN) technology. Moreover, we propose to run the user plane forwarding function on low cost IT hardware. The major advantages of our proposal are two-fold. First, our proposal lowers down the expenditure of operating services in LTE networks. Second, fine-grained resource management policies can be implemented in our virtualized gateway, which brings agility and reliability for the mobile cellular network.