On efficient data anchor point selection in distributed mobile networks

Existing gateway selection mechanisms base their selection on gateway load and/or geographical proximity of users to the gateways. In this paper, we mainly argue the need for other metrics to improve the gateway selection mechanisms in distributed mobile networks. We therefore propose considering the end-to-end connection and the service/application type as two important additional metrics in the selection of data anchor gateways in the context of the Evolved Packet System (EPS). To enable this, two solution variants are proposed. Simulations were also conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed solutions and encouraging results are obtained.