Toward Hyper Interconnected IoT World Using SDN Overlay Network for NGN Seamless Mobility

Abstract

Existing mobility protocols adopt centralized gateways and proxies to ensure session continuity for mobile users. The centralized architecture and the absence of effective selective traffic offload mechanism lead to inefficient data forwarding plane that congested the 4G Evolved Packet Core (EPC). Despite the tremendous ongoing efforts of 3GPP, IETF, vendors, and researchers, these problems still persist and restrict operators' offering for residential/enterprise indoor services extension and mobility deployments for session continuity in wide area motion as train or cars when crossing cities' boundaries. Moreover, latest advancements in cognitive services requiring real time collaborative interactions between moving users, server, and IoT smart terminals as drones, robots, smart vehicles ...etc attached to 5G edges can never be satisfied with existing protocols. This paper presents an initiative to a new mobility paradigm based on OpenFlow Software Defined Network (SDN) based technology to solve existing mobility problems, satisfy IoT collaborative interactions, and extend mobility coverage cross service providers under Service Level Agreements (SLAs) while ensuring the involved entities' privacy. Mobility is achieved through dynamic establishment of SDN overlay network that can cross any type of LAN/WAN/Cellular topology. Initial results show that join delay range is 0.2s in fully migrated SDN network and 1.5s in standard operator with direct home network SLA while the rest of packets are forwarded at almost wire speed.