A Home Agent Initiated Handover Solution for Fine-Grained Offloading in Future Mobile Internet Architectures: Survey and Experimental Evaluation

The currently standardized IP Flow Mobility IFOM solution in 3GPP is strictly User Equipment UE centric as the operator must firstly deliver the flow routing policies to the UE, and then the UE must provide these policies to the Packet Data Network Gateway PGW. Network-based NB solutions try to eliminate the above limitations and create an operator centric flow management framework. This paper is committed to give an overview of existing offloading techniques, to introduce the power of network-based solutions, and to propose a MIPv6/DSMIPv6 based NB-IFOM scheme relying on Home Agent initiated flow binding and aiming to enable operators to enforce IP flow routing policies without involving the UE first, such making able the PCRF Policy and Charging Rules Function to decide on the flow routing policy based on e.g., the available resources in the network, before signaling the policies to the UE. The authors have implemented their proposal, and performed an extensive evaluation in a hybrid real-emulated tested environment.