Virtualised EPC for on-demand mobile traffic offloading in 5G environments

Implementing and deploying virtualized Evolved Packet Core (vEPC) is a prioritized objective of operators and vendors towards a 5G network, enabling flexible network management while maximizing its availability based on virtualization aspects. However, current design and deployment initiatives for 5G do not consider that their adoption by operators will need to pass through a co-existence period with the existing legacy network. Considering the contribution of network virtualization aspects, along with standardized interworking procedures between 3GPP EPC networks, the vEPC can be exploited on demand to effectively address the explosion of traffic going through the legacy EPC network for traffic offloading, without requiring radical changes over the currently deployed infrastructure. This paper presents a NFV-based traffic offloading framework architecture using vEPC, aiming to enable on-demand traffic offloading when the legacy EPC network capacity is reaching an offloading threshold. In the proposed framework architecture, we present three vEPC modes representing different offloading aspects and resource usage. Available traffic monitoring methods and procedures for instantiating a vEPC on demand introduced are specified, while discussing additional aspects and issues for the proposed vEPC operations.