Understanding processing latency of SDN based mobility management in mobile core networks
Clarissa Cassales Marquezan, Zoran Despotovic, Ramin Khalili, David Perez-Caparros, Artur Hecker · 2016
Current solutions to evolve mobility management in Mobile Core Networks (MCN) based on SDN have showed the gain in flexibility and how to reduce control signaling. However, these works neglect the problems of describing the design choices of SDN Mobility Management Applications (MMA) and identifying where and what are the critical processing latency contributors for such design. Our paper addresses these problems. We study the internal mechanisms and interactions of MMA and controller, to determine the contributors to the overall processing latency. We implemented two MMA solutions (based on reactive and proactive designs) as modules of Floodlight, and we run experiments using Mininet and OpenFlow. The proactive MMA design can guarantee that the overall processing latency in the 95th percentile can be kept near the median value, given available CPU capacity at the SDN controller. One key lesson learned with our study is that only optimizing control signaling of MMA is not enough to provide better overall processing latency.