Dinand Roeland

Advanced WLAN integration with the 3GPP evolved packet core

The large growth in mobile broadband traffic, wide support of Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) technology in mobile devices, and the desire of operators to provide services anywhere at any time, have led to a need to integrate WLANs with the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Evolved Packet Core (EPC). This paper starts with a description of an architecture that 3GPP has defined to achieve this. It describes how a mobile device can set up an IP connection over WLAN routed via EPC without imposing new requirements on the mobile device. It also describes how more advanced features that do impose new requirements on the mobile device can be supported in an incremental fashion.

Novel Core Network Architecture for 5G Based on Mobile Service Chaining

A key requirement for the next generation mobile networks is flexibility to support multiple use cases with different network requirements. In this article, we focus on this challenge and propose a novel mobile core network architecture for 5G. We advocate an approach based on Software Defined Networking (SDN) that enables a solution without the need for centralized user plane nodes and with a strict division between control plane and user plane. This allows for flexibility to rapidly deploy network service functions in different deployment setups, supporting multiple use cases. The proposed architecture supports traffic aggregation on multiple granularities, not only per-device tunnels. This allows for efficiency and scalability required to support the massive amount of devices in the 5G time frame.