Performance Evaluation of a SDN/OpenFlow-Based Distributed Mobility Management (DMM) Approach in Virtualized LTE Systems

Currently most of the mobility management solutions rely on a centralized mobility anchor entity, which is in charge of both mobility-related control plane and user data forwarding. This makes mobility management prone to several performance limitations such as suboptimal routing, low scalability, potential single point of failure and the lack of granularity for the mobility management service. Distributed Mobility Management (DMM) is a mobility management solution that can be applied to overcome these limitations. In this paper we introduce a novel Software Defined Networking (SDN)/OpenFlow based DMM approach that can be applied in virtualized LTE systems. Using NS-3 simulation experiments we show that the introduced approach meets the performance related mobility management requirements.