SDN-based mobile packet core for multicast and broadcast services

The current mobile packet core network is evolving to cope with the pressure of the mobile traffic explosion and the advent of new services. Software-defined networking (SDN) is currently being adopted as one of the promising drivers for redesigning the mobile packet core network toward a 5G network. SDN-based mobile packet core approaches are expected to deliver features, such as fast service deployment, flexibility, and capital expenditure and operational expenditure reduction within future 5G networks. However, current SDN-based mobile packet core approaches only focus on providing unicast services without considering multicast and broadcast services. In this article, we propose an efficient SDN-based mobile packet core network architecture for supporting multicast and broadcast services. The proposed architecture takes advantage of the SDN paradigm and enables multicast and broadcast service deployment. In addition, a new SDN-based multicast subscription procedure is introduced to reduce network bandwidth resources. By numerical analysis, our scheme improves the current multicast and broadcast solution in terms of signaling cost.