UFA: Ultra Flat Architecture for high bitrate services in mobile networks

The challenge in the coming years for mobile networks will be to offer high bit rate data services to customers in mobility. Future mobile architectures are being standardized to offer mobility between heterogeneous access technologies. The design of these architectures does not take into account scalability requirement since they are centralized with many network levels and dependency. This paper proposes a new architecture, called ultra flat architecture (UFA), that integrates scalability requirement. The key idea of UFA is the reduction of the number of network nodes to one node which is the base station, by the distribution of traditional user and control plane functions in this node. We detail UFA architecture and show how it optimizes service establishment and mobility procedures. We perform a first performance evaluation of the solution performance and expose the first requirements that guarantee seamless handover for real-time services.