Software-Defined Mobility Support in IP Networks

A large number of solutions have been proposed to support mobility in IP networks including original Mobile IP, its derivatives and several newly proposed protocols. However, these solutions often show drawbacks in terms of triangle routing, handoff inefficiency, heavy signaling overhead, etc. when handling diversified mobility scenarios. In this paper, we argue that these problems can be addressed by an adaptive mobility solution based on software-defined networks (SDN). We discuss why SDN helps to solve the problems in current IP mobility protocols and give our design and algorithm to demonstrate how they are solved. We show performance benefits of the SDN-based proposal comparing with existing solutions by making evaluations based on real network topologies. We also implement our proposal using Mininet and experiment on it to prove that it is not only theoretically but also practically feasible to realize software defined mobility support in IP networks.