| Title | : | SDN Based LTE Evolved Packet Core Architecture for Efficient User Mobility Support |
| Speaker | : | Sakshi Chourasia (IITM) |
| Details | : | Tue, 25 Aug, 2015 2:00 PM @ BSB 361 |
| Abstract: | : | In current generation LTE networks, mobility management within and
across the network is handled by the Mobility Management Entity (MME)
and Local Mobility Anchor (LMA) respectively. Here, the LMA is
co-located at the Packet Data Network Gateway (PGW) of the Evolved
Packet Core (EPC). The downside of this architecture is that frequent
user mobility leads to high levels of signaling traffic from the
eNodeB (Evolved Node B) to the PGW to maintain the GTP and PMIPv6
tunnel. Moreover, presence of PGW at the edge of the network
introduces additional delay for every signaling procedure; also, the
use of a tunnel introduces additional packet header overhead. The
signaling overhead should be reduced especially when the number of LTE
users increases significantly, as expected in the near future.
As part of the thesis, we present an improved Evolved Packet Core (EPC) architecture based on Software Defined Networking (SDN) concepts. The proposed EPC architecture centralizes the control plane functionality of EPC thereby eliminating the use of mobility management protocols and reducing mobility related signaling costs. The architecture utilizes the global network view feature of SDN for mobility management. The proposed architecture has been implemented in the ns-3 simulator framework. The performance evaluation helps quantify the performance of the proposed architecture in terms of signaling cost, handover latency and scalability. A prototype of the proposed architecture is under implementation. The prototype implements the EPC functionality on top of the Floodlight SDN controller and the LTE base station is created with the help of open-source package called OpenLTE and USRP, a Software Defined Radio platform. The OpenLTE is used to run the LTE protocol stack layer of the eNodeB; the USRP is used for transmission and reception of the messages with the mobile devices. We show how the mobile user gets connected to the LTE network which has the SDN based EPC with the help of the prototype developed. |
