Edge-Based Evolved Packet Core (EPC) Refactoring for High Speed Mobility

The current design of long-term evolution (LTE) deploys Evolved Packet Core (EPC) components in a core network, while data traffic from User Equipment (UEs) is converged to these components. As the number of internet devices increases, this design causes network congestion and inefficiencies. One distributed way to solve the network burden is to deploy the on-demand EPC components close to the edge of network (near the base station; known as Edge-based EPC). At present, some researches directly use current EPC components for edge deployment, which is problematic. When a UE moves between two edge networks, it will face the inter-edge procedures to change serving edge components. The procedure involves many message exchanges between components of the connection re-establishment, which will affect the UE's experience. Thus, the current EPC architecture is not suitable for edge deployment. In on our previous study, we had derived a Refactored EPC (R-EPC) architecture (Chiang and Chen in A quantitative approach for refactoring NFV-based Mobile Core Networks. In: 2019 IEEE 30th international conference on application-specific systems, architectures and processors (ASAP), New York, pp 135, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1109/ASAP.2019.00-17 ). Then, we determine the deployment of R-EPC components based on their responsibilities and coined the term “architecture edge-based refactored EPC” (E-R-EPC). In E-R-EPC, we deploy service triggering-related components and the gateway responsible for trafficking data to the edge network, while deploying components that record the location of UE to the core network. Thus, the UE can utilize the low-latency data traffic services in the edge network. As the served recording location components are the same, the signaling cost for updating the location information is reduced. In addition, we propose a new handover procedure named inter-edge handover. Furthermore, we compare the signaling cost and queuing delay of E-R-EPC with other architectures. The results of the proposed architecture demonstrate good performance, especially in managing frequent movements of UE between two edge networks (e.g.: high-speed mobility). The results of the present study indicate that E-R-EPC is a suitable reference for edge-designed networks. Graphical abstract