Seamless Mobility Management in Heterogeneous 5G Networks: A Coordination Approach among Distributed SDN Controllers

The major objective of evolution towards 5G networks is to support increasing number of end devices with stringent latency and high bandwidth requirements. Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) are paving the way in supporting such requirements of 5G networks. In this paper, we propose a seamless mobility management for the users when they move from a SDN controller coverage to another in 5G heterogeneous networks. Our proposed solution utilizes the key-value Distributed Hash Table (DHT) to catch users’ mobility in a distributed SDN controller to address scability and seamlessness, where mobile device may join and leave between different associated SDN controllers. The proposed solution allows to select an appropriate AP with cooperation of mobile devices and controllers, so that network performance can be maximized and users’ demand can be met in a dynamically changing of network condition. The performance evaluated using OMNeT++ simulator imparts that the solution introduced in this paper can successfully reduce handover latency around 50% compared to the conventional mobility management solutions