Mobility management enhancements for 5G low latency services

Abstract

The 5G vision is to create a network that outperforms the current mobile networks in terms of flexibility, performance and use cases. This raises the requirements of the network to a totally new level. In order to achieve the latency goals the related applications and network functions need to be placed into the network edge. Full mobility support requires also enhancements to the current mobility management procedures. These include a gateway selection algorithm that is topology aware, handover procedures that are able to switch the user plane as quickly as possible and a seamless gateway relocation procedure. The low latency applications should also be able to manage the state between the application instances in different edge nodes. In this paper we introduce a 5G low latency network slice that offers 5G low latency services from the closest network edge node. Our prototype implementation verifies that this can be achieved by re-evaluating the optimality of the mobility anchor during each handover and executing a gateway relocation procedure when needed.