GiLAN Roaming: Roam Like at Home in a Multi-Provider NFV Environment

Abstract

‘Roam Like at Home’ is a slogan used to express the new roaming regulation applied to the countries within the European Union. Since June 15th, 2017, mobile network subscribers of the network operators within the European Union can use mobile services in other European countries without having extra charges for it. Although almost all mobile subscribers within countries of the European Union benefits from the new roaming rule, many mobile service providers are yet to be adapted to this change. Therefore, those providers bear the burden of the cost for the inter-provider traffic. Moreover, the latency between subscribers and their operator specific content must be reduced in order to provide a roaming service ‘like at home’. An emerging virtualization technology such as a Network Function Virtualization (NFV) sheds light on these challenges. This paper describes the concept of the mobile roaming service and our on-going implementation work as a part of 5G-PPP 5GEx project which aims at localizing inter-provider mobile traffic within the virtualized network infrastructure.