Network Functions Virtualization for Mobile Core and Heterogeneous Cellular Networks

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is a network architecture concept to improve network performance. This concept empowers the network capacities and reduces the cost and accelerates the network services and moving them to virtual severs. Mobility Management Entity (MME) is one of the feasible components for virtualization to control the plane due to its non-handling features for user data traffic. However, the MME does not handle the user data and not using any sort of hardware for data processing towards the cloud. The deployment of MME on the cloud is not an appropriate strategy due to the heavy load and complex processes. The main objective of this paper is to develop a suitable software deployment architecture Software-Defined Network-based Network Functions Virtualization (SDN-NFV) that can provide a cloud-optimized design for the MME. The proposed architecture is based on SDN networks to boost and enhance the traditional cellular network processes and functionalities. The proposed architecture contains three tiers including the data plane, control plane, and application plane. The data plane contains the switches, open flow protocol, and OpenSwitch virtual software and responsible to handle the data traffic and forward it to the correct destination based on flow entries in its flow table. The control plane is responsible for the entire network topology and contains the functionalities of traditional non-SDN routers and policies that come from the application plane. The application plane uses a virtualization environment where all the requirements are defined to the corresponding controller. The proposed architecture is evaluated in a simulation where it achieved better performance in terms of latency and throughput.