HDMM: deploying client and network-based distributed mobility management

Mobile operators are now facing the challenges posed by a huge data demand from users, mainly due to the introduction of modern portable devices and the success of mobile applications. Moreover, users are now capable to connect from different access networks and establish several active sessions simultaneously, while being mobile. This triggered the introduction of a new paradigm: the distributed mobility management (DMM) which aims at flattening the network and distributing the entities in charge of managing users' mobility. In this article, we review existing DMM proposals and describe a hybrid solution which benefits from combining a network-based and a client-based approach. We analyze the signaling cost and the handover latency of our proposal, comparing them with their centralized alternatives. We also include validation and performance results from experiments conducted with a Linux-based prototype, which show that achievable enhancements depend on the underlying network topology. We argue that the proposed hybrid DMM solution provides additional flexibility to the mobile network operators, which can decide when and how to combine these two approaches.