Distributed PDN gateway support for scalable LTE/EPC networks

Abstract

Recently, due to a explosive growth in the mobile Internet traffic, the problem of excessive data traffic handling on core network and thus scalability problem have been magnified in 3GPP Long Term Evolution/System Architecture Evolution (LTE/SAE) networks. Current LTE/SAE network based on the central packet data network gateway (P-GW) used as mobility anchor cannot deal with such problems. In this paper, we propose a new LTE/SAE network architecture supporting distributed P-GWs and the corresponding distributed mobility management to solve the problems. For this, in addition to the deployment of such distributed P-GWs, we propose a dynamic and distributed mobility management by distributing MMEs (Mobility Management Entities) which dynamically manages the location information of an UEs PDN connection, and also propose a handover procedure of such PDN connections by using the proposed distributed P-GWs and MMEs. The performance of the proposed distributed LTE/SAE network system is compared with the conventional LTE/SAE network system in terms of the P-GW's data processing volume per unit time and the number of valid data sessions accommodated in the LTE/EPC core network.