Leveraging proxy mobile IPv6 with SDN

The existing Proxy Mobile IPv6 suffers from a long handover latency which in turn causes significant packet loss that is unacceptable for seamless realtime services such as multimedia streaming. This paper proposes an OpenFlow-enabled proxy mobile IPv6 (OF-PMIPv6) in which the control of access gateways is centralized at an OpenFlow controller of a foreign network. The proposed OF-PMIPv6 separates the control path from the data path by performing the mobility control at the controller, whereas the data path remains direct between a mobile access gateway and a local mobility anchor in an IP tunnel form. A group of simple OpenFlow-enabled access gateways performs link-layer control and monitoring activities to support a comprehensive mobility of mobile nodes, and communicates with the controller through the standard OpenFlow protocol. The controller performs networklayer mobility control on behalf of mobile access gateways and communicates with the local mobility anchor in the Proxy Mobile IPv6 domain. Benefiting from the centralized view and information, the controller caches the authentication and configuration information and reuses it to significantly reduce the handover latency. An analytical analysis of the proposed OF-PMIPv6 reactive and proactive handover schemes shows 43% and 121% reduction in the handover latency, respectively, for highly utilized network. The results gathered from the OF-PMIPv6 testbed suggest similar performance improvements.