Load balancing for a Virtual and Distributed MME using Weighted Round Robin
Van‐Giang Nguyen, Karl‐Johan Grinnemo, Javid Taheri, Anna Brunström · Digitala vetenskapliga arkivet (Diva) (Karlstad University) · 2018
In this paper, we aim at tackling the scalability ofthe Mobility Management Entity (MME) which is one of the key control plane entities of the 4G Evolved Packet Core (EPC). One of the solutions to this problem is to virtualize the MME by adopting the Network Function Virtualization (NFV) technology and deploy it as a pool of virtualized instances (vMMEs) with a frontend load balancer. Although several designs have been proposed, a large part of them does not consider the load balancing aspect. To this end, we propose using a Weighted Round Robin (WRR) algorithm for balancing signaling load in a MME architecture. We implement and compare its performance to two currently used algorithms: random and round robin. Experimental results show that the WRR algorithm can significantly reduce the control plane latency as compared to the other two schemes.