Distributed Mobility Management for the Future Mobile Networks: A Comprehensive Analysis of Key Design Options

The design and deployment of a novel mobile network architecture, motivated by the challenges deriving from the explosive increase in data traffic on operator networks, are a pressing problem in today's telecommunications. Distributed mobility management (DMM) introduces a key idea to tackle the traffic bottlenecks that impact current mobile networks by proposing the deployment of distributed mobility anchor points close to terminal locations. There have been many proposals to build DMM solutions, with different focuses and merits for future mobile networks, aimed at overcoming the limitations from current centralized mobility management solutions. To the best of our knowledge, a comprehensive analysis and comparison study systematically analyzing available design options have not yet been provided. In this paper, we identify essential design considerations and their underlying options, comparing their impact on user and network performance. In addition, we provide the recent advances of DMM with emerging trends such as control-/data-plane separation and mobile cloud, which will impact the next generation network paradigm.