IP Flow Mobility: Smart Traffic Offload for Future Wireless Networks

The recent proliferation of smartphone-based mobile Internet services has created an extraordinary growth in data traffic over cellular networks. This growth has fostered interest in exploring alternatives to alleviate data congestion while delivering a positive user experience. It is known that a very small number of users and applications cause a big percentage of the traffic load. Hence, adopting smarter traffic management mechanisms is one of the considered alternatives. These mechanisms allow telecom operators to move selected IP data traffic, for instance, between the cellular infrastructure and the WLAN infrastructure, which is considered a key feature in the latest 3GPP and IETF specifications. This article presents and compares two possible approaches to IP flow mobility offloading that are currently being considered by the IETF. The first one is based on extending existing client-based IP mobility solutions to allow flow mobility where the user terminal is fully involved in the mobility process, and the second one is based on extending current network-based IP mobility solutions where the user terminal is not aware of the mobility.