SDN-based local mobility management with X2-interface in femtocell networks

Femtocell technology has been recognized as a potential solution to face the explosive growth of mobile broadband by boosting the spectral efficiency and coverage area. Femtocells simultaneously bring challenges to provide an optimized and seamless mobility management scheme. Some of the challenges include increased coordination and management complexity, signaling overhead, higher packet loss and handover delay due to frequent handovers. Software Defined Networking (SDN) has been proposed as a potential solution to address some of these challenges. In this work, we study the current 3GPP X2-based local mobility handling mechanism, and propose an SDN-based architecture that integrates the SDN paradigm into an X2-based local mobility management scheme in an enterprise femtocell network. We mathematically analyze the performance gain of the architecture by generating a closed form expression of the proposed scheme, minimizing both the signaling overhead and the handover latency.