Moving the mobile Evolved Packet Core to the cloud

In this paper, we describe an evolution of the mobile Evolved Packet Core (EPC) utilizing Software Defined Networking (SDN) that allows the EPC control plane to be moved into a data center. The EPC is a mobile aggregation network standardized by 3GPP for deployment of fixed and 4G mobile broadband services, having interoperability features for 3G and 2G mobile services. While mobile networks already deploy a considerable amount of software control, the ability of OpenFlow to decouple the control and data planes for IP routing provides the opportunity to simplify the configuration and maintenance of mobile aggregation networks by eliminating the distributed IP routing control plane. We extend OpenFlow 1.2 with two vendor extensions, one defining virtual ports to allow encapsulation and decapsulation and another to allow flow routing using the GTP Tunnel Endpoint Identifier (TEID). The result enables an architecture where the GTP control plane can be lifted up out of network elements such as the Serving Gateway and the Packet Data Network Gateway (PDN Gateway) and moved into a controller running in a virtual machine in a data center. The EPC network elements then run a simplified OpenFlow control plane, enhanced with GTP TEID routing extensions. We discuss a few new features that are enabled with GTP TEID routing and the status of a prototype.