Software Defined Mobile Networks (SDMN)

15Software Defined Mobility Management for Mobile Internet

Jun Bi and You Wang

Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

15.1 Overview

This chapter proposes to use software defined networking (SDN) to address mobility management in the Internet. This chapter first reviews existing mobility protocols in the Internet and points out their drawbacks. Then this chapter explains why SDN is a promising way to solve these problems, followed by a description of SDN-based mobility management architecture for mobile Internet. This chapter also presents an instantiation of this architecture that is designed and implemented using OpenFlow, as well as related evaluation and comparison with existing Internet mobility solutions to illustrate the advantages of the proposal.

15.1.1 Mobility Management in the Internet

Internet mobility has been an active research topic for over two decades. Along with the evolution of the Internet, especially the growing of mobile data due to more and more mobile devices and applications, many research efforts have been paid to address Internet mobility. However, so far, there is no consensus on how to provide mobility support in the Internet, making it remain an open issue.

15.1.1.1 Mobility Management in the Internet and Cellular Networks

Internet mobility research is different from that in cellular networks. Although cellular networking has been providing mobility support to global users, it may not replace the role of Internet mobility support because of their ...