Design and simulation analysis of network-based fully distributed mobility management in flattened network architecture

Mobile operators currently encounter numerous challenges caused by the centralized architecture of mobile networks. A single mobility anchor placed at the network core maintains the entire mobility and data traffic forwarding in the existing centralized mobility management (CMM) solutions. The CMM approach confronts several issues in scalability, reliability, signaling overhead, and non-optimal routing due to the increasing number of mobile devices and the volume of data traffic. To overcome these issues, a new architectural paradigm called distributed mobility management (DMM) is proposed to flatten the network architecture by moving mobility anchors closer to users and separating the control and data planes at the network edge. Two DMM solutions are developed: partially distributed mobility management (partial-DMM) in which only the data plane is distributed and fully distributed mobility management (full-DMM) where both control and data planes are distributed, which can be potentially applied for future mobile networks. This paper presents a network-based full-DMM scheme that was developed and implemented using NS2 network simulator by removing any dedicated centralized mobility anchor from the architecture. Extensive simulations were conducted to evaluate and compare the performance of the full-DMM model with that of the traditional CMM model. The simulation results show that the full-DMM provides lower end-to-end delay performance than CMM. However, the full-DMM generates higher handover latency and packet loss than CMM at high MN speeds. Moreover, simulation results clearly show the benefits of dynamic mobility activation in the full-DMM model.