A MEC-Assisted Method for Early Handover Using the Fully Distributed Mobility Management (MEC-F-DMM) Architecture

Abstract

Distributed mobility management (DMM) is a promising network-based mobility management protocol for mobile Internet. However, in case of an increasing number of MNs are associating and attaching to an AP of the DMM’s Mobility Anchor and Access Router (MAAR), the AP/MAAR may be easily overloaded. The emergence of Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) can allow operators to get better benefit in monitoring network’s situation. In this paper, A MEC-assisted method for early handover using the Fully Distributed Mobility Management (MEC-F-DMM) architecture was proposed. MEC-assisted DMM can (i) define the trigger-timing to force MNs to do early handover to the better target mobile network, (ii) decide which MNs are suitable to do early handover to avoid the network unbalance. The performance analysis has shown that the proposed MEC-F-DMM method has better network performance than the traditional fully DMM method in terms of average queuing delay, the packet delivery time, and throughput.