A Distributed Mobility Management Framework for 5G Converged Networks

A mobility management issue is surfacing again as it is expected that mobility requirements will be very essential and vary with application scenarios in the future 5G networks. An important research direction on this area is to design a flat and distributed control architecture to achieve scalability enough to be applied into the wide-scale real networks. In this paper, we propose a distributed mobility management framework for evolving networks toward 5G. The main idea is to separate location management from data traffic control during handling a node's handover. By being divided from location update to be propagated throughout whole network, handover control process can be localized and accelerated in a distributed manner. To apply different control operations according to handover types is another important feature of our approach. Experimental results from our simulation study show that the proposed framework considerably outperforms a well-known MM protocol, Proxy Mobile IPv6, in the aspects of handover latency, packet loss and dispersion of control overhead.