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closer to the user, distributing the control and data
infrastructures among the entities located at the edge
(access) of the network. DMM may be partially or
fully distributed, where in the former the distribution
scheme is applied only to the data plane while in the
latter to both the data and control planes. It is
important to notice that in the fully distributed
approach data and control planes needs to be
decoupled although they are both handled by the
distributed anchor points.
Figure 1: Generic DMM approach scheme.
The Mobile Cloud Networking (MCN) project
0(EU FP7 MCN, 2013), as one of the EU FP7
projects, integrates the use of cloud computing
concepts in LTE mobile networks in order to
increase LTE’s performance. This is accomplished
by building a shared distributed LTE mobile
network that can optimize the utilization of
virtualized computing, storage and network
resources and minimize communication delays. In
particular, the integration of cloud computing
concepts in a LTE system, can be realized by: (1)
extending the cloud computing concept beyond the
typical (macro) data centers towards new smaller
(micro) data centers that are distributed within the e-
UTRAN and the EPC, and (2) deploying and
running cloud-based (virtualized) e-UTRAN,
denoted as RAN as a Service (RANaaS), and EPC,
denoted as EPC as a Service (EPCaaS). This trend is
also in line with the emerging ETSI activities in
Network Functions Virtualization (NFV). The use of
DMM can be applied in such environments not only
to enhance the LTE mobility management
performance and provide session continuity to users
across personal, local, and wide area networks
without interruption, but also to support traffic
redirection when a virtualized LTE entity, like the P-
GW running on an virtualization platform (i.e.,
originating data centre) is migrated to another
virtualization platform (i.e., destination data centre)
and ongoing sessions supported by this P-GW need
to be maintained. In (Chan, 2013), the main IETF
requirements for DMM solutions in IPv6 networks
deployments are defined as follows:
Distributed Deployment: IP address mobility
and routing solutions provided by DMM must
enable distributed processing for mobility
management so that traffic does not need to
traverse centrally deployed mobility anchors and
thereby avoid non-optimal routes.
Transparency: DMM solutions must provide
transparent mobility support above the IP layer
when needed.
IPv6 Deployment: DMM solutions should target
IPv6 as the primary deployment environment and
should not be tailored specifically to support
IPv4, in particular in situations where private
IPv4 addresses and/or NATs (Network Address
Translations) are used.
Co-existence: The DMM solution must be able
to co-exist with existing network deployments
and end hosts. For instance, depending on the
environment in which DMM is deployed, DMM
solutions may need to be compatible with other
deployed mobility protocols or may need to
interoperate with a network or mobile hosts/
routers that do not support DMM protocols.
Security Considerations: A DMM solution
must not introduce new security risks or amplify
existing security risks against which the existing
security mechanisms/protocols cannot offer
sufficient protection.
Flexible Multicast Distribution: DMM should
consider multicasting. So the solutions can be
developed that, not only to provide IP mobility
support when it is needed, but also to avoid
network inefficiency issues in multicast traffic
delivery (
e.g., duplicate multicast subscriptions
towards the downstream tunnel entities).
In the context of this paper also the following
additional requirements are defined:
Dynamicity: The dynamic use of mobility
support by allowing the split of data flows along
different paths that may travel through either the
mobility anchor or non-anchor nodes, even
though no specific route optimization support is
available at the correspondent node. This
requirement will tackle the lack of fine
granularity of the centralized mobility
management approaches.
Separating Control and Data Planes: Keeping
the control plane centralized while distributing
the data plane is a possible solution to minimize
the signaling overhead between the mobility
anchors due to the lack of knowledge that a
distributed anchor point has of its peers and their
connected UEs.
Network-based: Not burdening the UE with
extra signaling and keeping the user unaware of
the on-going handoff procedure within the same
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