Self-Adaptable IP Control in Carrier Grade Mobile Operator Networks

The current trend in wireless operator networks is towards deploying in parallel a large number of heterogeneous access network technologies and core network functions in order to reach a higher capacity and thus accommodating the communication needs of a high number of connected devices. However, the wireless operator network is designed for handling uniformly all subscribers from the perspective of mobility management, subscription information, resource reservation and charging. The current architecture corroborated with a high increase of connected devices requires a new level of scalability to be attained which is not realizable. This dissertation provides a framework, named SelfFit, for subscriber oriented automatic adaptation of connectivity from core network perspective for access network selection, ecient usage of the core network resources and the data path adaptation, addressing the previous scalability challenge. In these three directions, a set of ve innovative self-adaptation concepts for dynamic carrier grade network infrastructures was developed. The concepts were immediately exemplied as additions to the current 3GPP Evolved Packet Core (EPC) architecture, for proving their value in a standard, real-life deployed architecture. Additionally, the functionality was prototyped on top of the Fraunhofer FOKUS OpenEPC toolkit and evaluated on complete realistic testbed setups, providing a practical view on how it can be realized as part of future core network products. For assessing the limitations of existing technologies as well as of the proposed solutions, a rigorous generic evaluation framework was developed including the requirements denition, a simplied network model, qualitative metrics for assessing heterogeneous technologies, and comparative qualitative testbed measurements. The evaluation framework enables the reader to grasp a clear evidence of the innovation value included in this dissertation from innovative idea to pre-product prototyping.