Towards On-Demand Mobility Management in SDN

Software Defined Networking (SDN) has been embraced by industry and academia alike to design the networks for future. Many network domains like traffic engineering, security and provisioning benefit from the centralized control provided by SDN through control and data plane separation. IP mobility is one of such domains, benefited from the centralized network view of the SDN controller. SDN-based IP mobility solutions in current literature consider every flow which causes elevated signaling cost and handover latency, whereas in reality not every flow requires the mobility support. This paper solves the problem of elevated signaling cost and handover latency by incorporating on-demand mobility concept, in which flows are differentiated based on different Home Network Prefixes assigned to a mobile device. The proposed solution can reduce the signaling cost and handover latency by only considering those flows which are delay intolerant and require session continuity. We show analytical evaluation of the proposed idea comparing with SDN-based IP mobility. Our analytical results show that the proposed idea reduces 50% signaling cost of the signaling cost over an existing solution.