Routing-Based Mobility Architecture for Future 5G Cellular Networks

Abstract

In the 5G era, centralized mobility management raises the issue of traffic concentration on the mobility anchor. Distributed mobility management is expected to be a solution for this issue, as it moves mobility anchor functions to multiple edge routers. However, it incurs path stretch and redundant traffic on the backhaul links. Although these issues were not considered important in the 3G/4G era, they are expected to be a serious problem in the 5G era. In this paper, we design a routing-based mobility management mechanism to address the above problems. The mechanism integrates distributed routing with Bloom Filters and an anchor-less scheme where edge routers work as mobility anchors. Simulations show that the proposed mechanism achieves a good balance between redundant traffic on the backhaul links and routing overhead.