Master Thesis Seamless Distributed Mobility Management (dmm) Solution in Cloud Based Lte Systems

Distributed Mobility Management (DMM) refers to a set of solutions developed to overcome the limitations posed by currently deployed centralized mobility management schemes. DMM offers to operators a more efficient network deployment driven by a distributed placement of core network entities close to the edge (access) of the network. The huge appreciation received by Cloud Computing technologies in latest years pushed mobile network operators to plan the adoption of virtualization in their future network aiming at the possibility to share a common infrastructure among them. Innovative DMM solutions can exploit the natural distribution of users and mobility information within these shared virtualized networks envisioning the support of cross-operator mobility management. This research focuses on the design, implementation and evaluation of three DMM solutions in cloud based LTE systems. A novel architecture has been defined to support DMM by means of redirecting the traffic to the relocated mobility anchor point in order to allow IP address continuity to flows kept active by the UEs upon movement. Traffic redirection occurs in the transport network above the Evolved Packet System (EPS) via encapsulation-free forwarding schemes based on two different technologies: NAT and OpenFlow. Whereas all proposed solutions have been proven to offer seamless mobility management to UEs which handovers trigger the relocation of their distributed mobility anchor points, the results confirmed the inborn versatility and efficiency of the OpenFlow protocol. Furthermore, being migration of virtualized entities and functions a prominent feature of cloud based networks, DMM can be also used to support traffic redirection when a virtualized P-GW entity, running on a virtualization platform, is migrated to another virtualization platform and the ongoing sessions supported by this P-GW need to be maintained. Indeed, solutions like mobility prediction systems have been proven to be required to provide seamless mobility to UEs moving to a location where their virtualized mobility anchor has to be migrated.