Improving throughput in DMM with mobile-assisted flow mobility

The development of new applications and mobile devices has increased the data traffic in cellular networks and required throughput improvements, which can be achieved through heterogeneous access networks, where multimodal user devices able to establish simultaneous connections with different access networks are considered. Such connections and data offloading between Wi-Fi and cellular networks provide load balancing and increase the throughput of heterogeneous cellular networks. Offloading can be performed at the network layer through the move of Internet Protocol (IP) flows, and mobility management solutions can be used as a basis for this purpose. This article proposes an architecture called Seamless IP Flow and Distributed Mobility Management (SIFDMM), which is based on a distributed mobility management solution and improves heterogeneous network throughput by moving IP flows between Wi-Fi and LTE networks. SIFDMM mitigates congestion in the networks and causes no problem of single point of failure, scalability, and reliability of centralized solutions. An analytical comparison was performed for an effective demonstration of the throughput improvement in heterogeneous networks.