Dynamic anchor points selection for mobility management in Software Defined Networks

International audienceToday consumers want to stay connected to networking services anywhere and at anytime. Managing consumers׳ mobility to ensure session and service continuity in efficient and effective manner is more and more challenging due to the increasing number of mobile devices and their high mobility pattern. Different solutions have been proposed in the literature to tackle this problem. They are based on a single mobility management point, called mobility anchor. Unfortunately, most of these solutions suffer from long packets delivery delay and high overhead ratio. In this work, we propose a new mobility management called Software Defined Mobility Management (SDMM) based on the Software Defined Network (SDN) paradigm. The proposed solution is network based, where the mobility is managed by network entities. In opposite to existing approaches, the anchor point is dynamically selected for each flow by a virtual function implemented at the top of the SDN controller which has a global view of the network. The main advantages of our approach are threefold: first reducing packet delivery delay, second reducing the handover latency and third minimizing the tunneling overhead