Introducing MPLS in Mobile Data Networks: An High Performance Framework for QoS-Powered IP Mobility

Abstract

Because of the evolution of portable computing, and personal communication technologies, mobile Internet connectivity is the fastest growing business in the telecommunications market, playing a vital role in shaping the 21^st century communications paradigms. In this scenario, the deployment of innovative wireless data networks, the integration with the Internet and the inter-working between different wireless technologies will be challenging objectives for competitive service providers. These factors, combined with the impact that mobile related traffic may have on the fixed infrastructure, and the convergence of mobile and fixed services, drive towards a rationalization of the resource allocation and management procedures and make it urgent to address the node mobility problem from a global, core-level traffic engineering point of view. We propose a framework for the integration of IP mobility and MPLS in the mobile data network focusing on the use of consolidated technology, with no major changes to standardized protocols or devices. Our model that handles wireless IP device mobility by combining local area mobility techniques at the edge and MPLS in the backbone, allows very fast handovers without the need of modifying the IP address, works with any IP version, has a low header overhead (compared to IP-in-IP tunneling), and can get the native traffic engineering and QoS benefits provided by MPLS to continuously adequate the traffic flows in the mobile data network backbone to the dynamically changing traffic requirements.