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The European 5G PPP (5G Infrastructure Public Private Partnership) researches recognizing Software Defined Networking (SDN) as an emerging key technology for next generation networks pave the way for operators to launch new series of rich customized data and multimedia services. Tremendous innovation in smart homes, offices, remote health care, and multimedia streaming services raise an urgent need for continuous connectivity to real time indoor services. Effective solutions are required with optimal cost structures through the benefits gained by leveraging automation to ensure seamless coverage in high mobility situations as crossing wide geographically separated locations (Odini et al., 2015; 5G-PPP, 2015). Session continuity associated with user’s motion in train or car crossing cities’ boundaries is one of the raised problems by 5G Automotive Vision. The ultimate goal is tremendous users experience in high challenging mobility situations (5G-PPP, 2015; Abdulhussein et al., 2015). 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) exhausted several trials to provide an effective solution that guarantees session continuity in wide area motion with uninterruptable access to residential, enterprise, and internet services. Unluckily, existing solutions suffer dramatically from inefficient data forwarding that leads to Evolved Packet Core (EPC) congestion and induces high latency in services offered. LIMONET trials in 3GPP releases from 9 to 12 as well as the IETF Multipath TCP, discussed in section III, highlight these problems (ETSI, 2016; Gupta & Rastogi, 2012; Hampel, Rana, & Klein, 2013; Wang, 2015).
This research proposes a novel network based Mobile IP (MIP) framework using SDN, called SRMIP, which ensures session continuity in normal and challenging situations. SRMIP guarantees uninterruptible accessibility to indoor services with an effective offload mechanism. A prototype is established to assess framework feasibility, ensure seamless handover, and wire speed forwarding of Mobile Node’s (MN) packets without congesting core networks. Experimental results show strong improvements in mobility setup delay for standard and wide area motion over LTE total bearer setup time in Proxy Mobile IP (PMIP). Handover delay inside city becomes equivalent to L2 handover in Software-Defined Wireless Networks (SDWN) that is highly better than LTE. SRMIP ensures session continuity during handover cross cities that is currently unfeasible in LTE as of the highlighted EPC congestion problem. The clue is replacing LTE bearer in PMIP and GPRS Tunneling Protocol (GTP) with OpenFlow virtual paths. SRMIP eliminates LTE out-band signaling as PMIP/GTP-C control messages associating bearer setup/release during MN’s join/handover through recursive establishment of SDN-OpenFlow virtual paths in-line with the allocation of MN’s IP address.
The paper is organized as follows; Section II gives an overview on existing mobility protocols and performance degradation associating tunneling. Section III describes the inefficient data forwarding plan of existing mobility protocols that induces core congestion problem and limits session continuity in real deployments of wide area motion. Section IV briefs OpenFlow SDN-based technology and states related research. Section V presents SRMIP framework, highlights LTE gained advantages from being OpenFlow SDN-based, illustrates the key design concepts and states how the described problems are solved. Section VI analyzes SRMIP experimental results and compares them to SDWN and PMIP. Section VIII highlights research conclusion and contributions.