Decoupling and distribution of mobility management

Current mobility management approaches deploy heavy centralized models that are not prepared to deal with the requirements of growing mobile environments, leading to suboptimal routing and scalability problems. As a first step towards a decoupled and distributed mobility management architecture, we propose and evaluate different approaches for the distribution of the mobility management functionalities. We initiate our mobility decoupling from the most common split into data and control planes. We go further in splitting the control plane of mobility management into location and handover management. We evaluate the distributed approaches, based on the proposed decoupling, and we compare them with the most adopted fully-centralized approaches. The results of the evaluation demonstrate that the distribution of mobility management functionalities through elements closer to the end-user improve both user and network performance, even in a hierarchical network topology.