Mobility management in the future mobile network

The current mobile network architectures are heavily hierarchical, which implies that all traffic must be traversed through a centralized core entity. This makes the network prone to several limitations, e.g., suboptimal communication paths, low scalability, signaling overhead, and single point of failure. The hierarchy of the data forwarding procedure in current network architectures can be eliminated by letting IP flows be routed in a more flexible way. One of the key enablers for this is to shift towards fatter (decentralized) network architectures. This approach allows to place distributed anchor points in the proximity of the radio access network to locally handle Mobile Nodes' (MNs') connections and data traffic, and accordingly reduce the load of traffic in the core network. Long-Term Evolution (LTE) is expected to be the leading mobile networking technology in the coming decade. It is estimated that LTE network will handle about 79% of the worldwide mobile data traffic by 2021. Therefore, we first review the current (centralized) LTE network system, and next discuss an approach to realize deployment of an LTE network with decentralized architecture. When dealing with the transition from the centralized and hierarchical LTE network architecture to a decentralized one, mobility management is one of the key functions that needs to be adapted to the new architecture. In the current LTE system, the mobility management function follows a centralized scheme, in which the Packet Data Network Gateway (PGW) redirects traffic flows to MNs' new locations, for those moving from one access network to another (i.e., from one Serving Gateway (SGW) to another). However, in an LTE network with decentralized architecture, the PGW and SGW functions are co-located into the single entities (i.e., S/PGWs) closer to the radio access network, that handle the MNs' connection functions, data traffic and mobility locally. This, demands additional mechanisms to maintain the MN's ongoing data session active, when it performs a handover with S/PGW relocation. To address this, we develop three novel mechanisms rely on the Network Address Translation (NAT) technique, Software Defined Network (SDN) paradigm, and Multipath-TCP (MPTCP) protocol