An Efficient Multihoming Scheme to Support Seamless Handover in SDN-based Network Mobility

Multihoming technology is widely used to contribute reliability and performance improvement in network mobility by providing multiple connections to mobile routers. The mobile router may have to choose a suitable connection among available connections for the mobile node. In this paper, we propose a handover method for network mobility that utilizes the multihoming feature of a mobile router in SDN-based network mobility (SDN-MNEMO). We newly introduce an access router (AR) selection method to select the optimal AR for seamless handover in multihoming network mobility. The optimal AR is selected considering throughput of the backhaul links and downlink bit rate information of the available ARs in the mobility network. Using an experimental testbed, we present a thorough handover performance evaluation of our proposed scheme, and compare it with a conventional SDN-NEMO scheme. The results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the conventional scheme while achieving seamless handover. The handover delay in the conventional scheme is 7.15s compared to 72ms in the proposed scheme. Also, average throughput for the mobile node reached up to 950Kbps and it remained constant during the handover for the proposed scheme.