dMME: Virtualizing LTE mobility management

With the convergence between phone and data networks in LTE and 4G, cellular signaling traffic is increasingly carried over IP. Control plane functions, once performed by dedicated machinery, are evolving into large-scale network applications with strict requirements on delay, availability, and proc...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in2011 IEEE 36th Conference on Local Computer Networks pp. 528 - 536
Main Authors Xueli An, Pianese, Fabio, Widjaja, Indra, Acer, Utku Gunay
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 01.10.2011
Subjects
Base stations
Context
Mobile radio mobility management
Process control
Protocols
Servers
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Summary:With the convergence between phone and data networks in LTE and 4G, cellular signaling traffic is increasingly carried over IP. Control plane functions, once performed by dedicated machinery, are evolving into large-scale network applications with strict requirements on delay, availability, and processing throughput as mandated by 3GPP standards. In this paper we present DMME, a distributed architecture that implements mobility management for next-generation cellular systems. DMME is a scalable and cost-effective drop-in replacement for the LTE mobility management entity (MME). We evaluate the DMME scheme via analysis and simulation under several deployment scenarios, using mobility patterns drawn from synthetic models and from traces collected in a production network. We also report preliminary performance figures by our DMME prototype implementation. Our results confirm that distributed architectures are a viable choice to reliably support high-throughput, latency-sensitive control plane functions.
ISBN:1612849261
9781612849263
ISSN:0742-1303
DOI:10.1109/LCN.2011.6115386