SDN-enabled LTE/EPC Converged Network

• Main Authors: SUNG, BI-LING, 宋璧伶
• Other Authors: CHIANG, WEI-KUO
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2016
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/p3r8da

碩士 === 國立中正大學 === 資訊工程研究所 === 104 === LTE (Long Term Evolution) is an innovative mobile access network and it is the trend of the mobile network. LTE can provide various real-time and non-real-time services to users and provide wide-range and high-speed data transmission rate. LTE/EPC (Long Term Evolution/ Evolved Packet Core) converged network is a kind of deployed architecture, which proposed in recent years. It mainly merges Serving Gateway (SGW) and PDN Gateway (PGW) functional entities within a single node to reduce the cost of deployment and maintenance. The solution of SDN technology is that separating the functionality of network element’s control signaling and data forwarding. The functionality of handling control signaling does the applications and the applications control the network physical element, which is responsible for forwarding data, by SDN controller. It can improve data transmission efficiency. OpenFlow protocol is the most commonly used by SDN. We apply SDN in LTE/EPC converged network. We propose SDN-based LTE/EPC architecture called OpenFlow-based Mobile Network (OFMN). In OFMN, merging SGW and PGWs’ functional entities within a single node is called S/PGW. S/PGW control plane (S/PGW-C) and MME are realized as an application running on top of controller. We place some sharing databases of S/PGW-C and MME on SDN controller. Enhanced SDN controller with sharing databases is called Mobile Controller. Therefore, using Mobile Controller can reduce the numbers of message exchange between Mobile Controller and control plane applications. In currently, OpenFlow protocol cannot support GTP (GPRS Tunneling Protocol). We change the way of routing and adopting MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching) to replace GTP. We evaluate the control signaling load of OFMN architecture and compare it to 3GPP architecture, partial SDN-enable architecture and Full SDN-enabled architecture. We also use the queuing model to calculate the total processing delay time for these four architectures. From the results of that, OFMN architecture has little impact on control signaling load, and OFMN's total processing delay time is less than the other architectures during network operating.