Handover management for distributed mobility management in SDN-based mobile networks

Centralized mobility management (CMM) is widely used in current long-term evolution (LTE) networks. The rapidly-growing number of mobile subscribers has led to the creation of a large number of signaling messages. This makes it difficult to efficiently manage mobile networks and the mobility of subscribers simultaneously. One of the problems related to CMM is a single point of failure. To solve the problems of CMM, IETF
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has developed a solution that distributed mobility management (DMM), in which mobility is handled via the nearest mobility anchor. The LTE architecture provides software-defined networking (SDN) to meet the requirements of 5G networks and to forward massive mobile data traffic. The SDN solution proposes separation of the control and data planes of a network. In this paper, we propose a DMM solution with handover operations for SDN-enabled LTE networks. The advantage of the proposed solution is that intra and inter handover procedures are defined with the data buffering and forwarding processes between base stations and mobility anchors. We adopt a simulation model to evaluate and compare the proposed solution with the existing solution in terms of handover latency and packet loss.