Experimental Evaluation of a SDN-DMM Architecture

Mobility management has become a great challenge due to the exponential growth in the number of devices that can connect to home or visited networks, and the need for providing seamless mobility in future generation networks. SDN-DMM (Software Defined Network Architecture for Distributed Mobility Management) architecture has been proposed [11], allowing to separate control and data planes, for the distributed mobility management through bidirectional IP flows. This article reports on aspects related to the implementation of SDN-DMM, conducted with metrics as packet loss, throughput and handover latency, considered in a comparison involving traditional routing and SDN-DMM. The results show the SDN approach not only provides the intrinsic benefits of SDN in comparison with traditional architectures, but also deals with the distributed mode of mobility management in heterogeneous access networks in a simplified and efficient way.

MPTCP Tunnel: An Architecture for Aggregating Bandwidth of Heterogeneous Access Networks

Fixed and cellular networks are two typical access networks provided by operators. Fixed access network is widely employed; nevertheless, its bandwidth is sometimes not sufficient enough to meet user bandwidth requirements. Meanwhile, cellular access network owns unique advantages of wider coverage, faster increasing link speed, more flexible deployment, and so forth. Therefore, it is attractive for operators to mitigate the bandwidth shortage by bundling these two. Actually, there have been existing schemes proposed to aggregate the bandwidth of two access networks, whereas they all have their own problems, like packet reordering or extra latency overhead. To address this problem, we design new architecture, MPTCP Tunnel, to aggregate the bandwidth of multiple heterogeneous access networks from the perspective of operators. MPTCP Tunnel uses MPTCP, which solves the reordering problem essentially, to bundle multiple access networks. Besides, MPTCP Tunnel sets up only one MPTCP connection at play which adapts itself to multiple traffic types and TCP flows. Furthermore, MPTCP Tunnel forwards intact IP packets through access networks, maintaining the end-to-end TCP semantics. Experimental results manifest that MPTCP Tunnel can efficiently aggregate the bandwidth of multiple access networks and is more adaptable to the increasing heterogeneity of access networks than existing mechanisms.