Mobility Management for Low-Latency Handover in SDN-Based Enterprise Networks

Low-latency handover is crucial to real-time traffic in wireless networks. This paper considers an enterprise network managed by emerging Software Defined Network (SDN) technology. For this networking environment, we propose a mobility management scheme named Mobility SDN (M-SDN) that reduces the traffic pause time caused by a host-initiated layer-2 handover. M-SDN performs handover preparation in parallel with the layer-2 handover that involves N-casting of active flows to every potential handover target. Handover preparation is enabled by efficient address resolution and location tracking. We have implemented a prototype of M-SDN and conducted several experiments to evaluate the performance of M-SDN. Experimental results show that M-SDN effectively reduces the impact of layer-2 handovers without any modification on mobile devices.