Network architecture supporting seamless flow mobility between LTE and WiFi networks

Recently, there has been a tremendous growth in mobile network traffic. Network providers are looking for techniques that selectively offload the mobile data traffic onto WiFi (IEEE 802.11) networks to balance the load and improve network performance. Several architectures based on Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) have been proposed to support seamless data offloading. The demerits of PMIPv6 include lack of flow mobility and single point of failure. There exist architectures that extend PMIPv6 to support flow mobility, but still face the problem of overhead at the gateway and single point of failure. In this paper, we propose Seamless Internetwork Flow Mobility (SIFM), a new architecture that overcomes these drawbacks and provides seamless data offload supporting flow mobility. Both the PMIPv6 and the SIFM architectures have been implemented and evaluated incorporating salient LTE and WiFi network features in the ns-3 simulator. The performance studies validate that seamless mobility can be achieved for clients in both of these architectures. The results show that for the best possible (scenario dependent) offload value, the SIFM architecture shows an improvement of 13.86%, 29.05% and 11.33% whereas the PMIPv6 architecture shows an improvement of 7.96%, 19.52% and 7.83% in terms of delay, packet loss and throughput respectively compared to no offload scenario in each architecture. Further, we also show that the support for flow mobility in the SIFM architecture provides the flexibility to move selective flows to another network. This helps in achieving better performance gain compared to moving all the flows of the user as done in the PMIPv6 architecture.