MocLis: A Moving Cell Support Protocol Based on Locator/ID Split for 5G System

In LTE (Long Term Evolution) / LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) system, the user-plane for a user equipment (UE) is provided by tunneling, which increases header overhead, processing overhead, and management overhead. In addition, the LTE-A system does not support moving cells which are composed of a mobile Relay Node (RN) and UEs attached to the mobile RN. Although there are several proposals for moving cells in the LTE-A system and the 5G system, all of them rely on tunneling for the user-plane, which means that none of them avoid the tunneling overheads. This paper proposes MocLis, a moving cell support protocol based on a Locator/ID split approach. MocLis does not use tunneling. Nested moving cells are supported. Signaling cost for handover of a moving cell is independent of the number of UEs and nested RNs in the moving cell. A MocLis prototype, implemented in Linux, includes user space daemons and modified kernel. Measurements show that the attachment time and handover time are short enough for practical use. MocLis has higher TCP throughput than the tunneling based approaches.