| Title | : | Network architecture supporting seamless flow mobility between LTE and WiFi networks |
| Speaker | : | P R Dhathri (IITM) |
| Details | : | Tue, 18 Aug, 2015 3:00 PM @ BSB 361 |
| Abstract: | : | Recently, there has been a tremendous growth in mobile network traffic
that is requiring novel solutions in network design. Network providers
are looking for techniques that selectively offload the mobile data
traffic onto WiFi (IEEE 802.11) networks to balance the load and
improve network performance. Several architectures based on the IETF
Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) framework have been proposed to support
seamless data offloading. The demerits of PMIPv6 include lack of flow
mobility and single point of failure. There exist architectures that
extend PMIPv6 to support flow mobility, but still face the problem of
overhead at the gateway and single point of failure.
We propose the Seamless Internetwork Flow Mobility (SIFM) architecture, that overcomes these drawbacks and provides seamless data offload supporting flow-level mobility. The unique feature is that an end user's session flows can be sent on any one of the available interfaces (LTE, WiFi, etc.) depending upon network conditions and flow requirements. Both the PMIPv6 and the SIFM architectures have been implemented and evaluated incorporating salient LTE and WiFi network features in the ns-3 simulator. The performance studies validate that seamless mobility can be achieved for clients in both of these architectures. Further, we also show that the support for flow mobility in the SIFM architecture helps in achieving better performance compared to PMIPv6 architecture. We also evaluate the SIFM architecture by implementing it on an experimental testbed. The LTE network is emulated using an Opensource implementation of LTE EPC and LTE eNodeB known as OpenLTE. USRP B210x, a software defined radio platform by National Instruments, is integrated with OpenLTE to implement eNodeB. A laptop running Ubuntu 12.04 is configured to run as a WiFi access point. The hostapd daemon (implementing a WiFi hotspot) together with dnsmasq is used to provide Wireless Access Gateway (WAG) capabilities on the laptop. An off-the-shelf LG G2 mobile phone running Android 4.2.2 is used as the user equipment. We demonstrate that the connections can be moved seamlessly between the LTE network and the WiFi network with the help of ICMP ping and a TCP chat application. |
