A policy-based per-flow mobility management system design

An intelligent network infrastructure is proposed to provide best user experience in a heterogeneous environment. This infrastructure, leveraging SDN, NFV, and cloud-based technologies, which play a key role in service differentiation at a very low granularity level, supports user session continuity, through seamless per-flow handovers, while implementing dynamic policy management schemes. The framework takes advantage of dynamic flow reconfiguration capabilities to enable mobility mechanisms based on physical to virtual address encapsulation and tunnelling executed by a simple flow table entry update. Policies may be defined by networks, users, devices, and applications, including also security-related policies. The proposed virtualized network infrastructure, using dynamic information from layer 2 and 3, along with the mobility mechanisms, and the policy-based logic make intelligent, context-aware decisions on how and when to use each network access, in what combination, and in a secure manner. This approach provides user and mobile node independence, from network and access technologies, rendering changes in network availability invisible to the user rather than leading to application failures, as they do today.