A Load-Considered Handover Control Scheme for Distributed Mobility Management (DMM) Using Software Defined Network (SDN) in the Vehicular Environment

Supporting mobile devices and smart city applications are the most crucial goals in the ongoing development of 5G cellular systems. Distributed Mobility Management (DMM) can be used for levelling the vehicular mobility architecture to resolve issues, e.g., non-optimal path and scalability that exist in the future mobile Internet. There is the network situation that it may have multiple target destinations of the next network to the moving vehicle, which is called as Mobile Node (MN), can handover in vehicular networks. Therefore, it requires to make a suitable handover decision based on both the networking loading and MN's received signal strength. Although there are several studies applying Software Defined Network (SDN) to DMM for improving the performance of existed DMM-based schemes, the current network-based handover approaches still endure the high handover latency and high signaling cost. In this paper, a Load-Considered Handover Control Scheme for Distributed Mobility Management (DMM) using Software Defined Network (SDN) over the vehicular environment, which is called as LC-SDN-DMM, that can support the handover decision and let MN be able to complete the handover preparation before MN disconnecting from the currently serving Mobility Anchor and Access Router (MAAR) to the next suitable MAAR, was proposed. LC-SDN-DMM also can support selecting the suitable next anchor router through the assistance of the SDN Controller. The simulation analysis has proved that the proposed LC-SDN-DMM approach has better handover performance than the conventional DMM approach regarding to throughput, handover delay and packets loss.