Mobile network traffic has been growing at a very fast pace. In addition, the variation of network end points, the variation of applications, and the variation of mobility states of user equipment devices (“UE”) (e.g., whether or not a UE is moving, and if so, how fast) are growing, and this trend will likely continue.
In the current state of the art, different radio technologies, such as WI-FI and cellular, utilize different management and control mechanisms, and the same is true even within Third Generation Partnership Project (“3GPP”) cellular technologies. Current cellular mobility management treats all network end points as equal. This management approach works for existing device types, including, for example, smart devices such as smart phones, tablets, and the like.
The traditional approach of cellular mobility management that treats all network end points the same will no longer work cost effectively in the new paradigm where billions of Internet of Things (“IoT”) and machine-to-machine (“M2M”) end points exist and most of these devices never move. The evolution to 5G networks will embrace a mosaic of radio access technologies (“RATs”). For this reason, a better, simpler, and more cost-effective mobility management approach is needed that can also take into account the device type.
Current cellular standards for quality of service (“QoS”) support rely upon general packet radio service (“GPRS”) tunneling protocol (“GTP”) tunnel and bearer concepts. These concepts are based upon a connection-oriented architecture and will not scale well in the new paradigm where billions of IoT/M2M end points will be deployed. Although some progress has been made in the industry with regard to how to use software-defined networking (“SDN”) to provide QoS in a mobility network, this progress has heretofore been limited to applying SDN QoS to an existing connection-oriented mobility bearer architecture.
QoS for connectionless networks is currently being implemented using a differentiated services (“DiffServ”) architecture. The DiffServ architecture is based upon a per-flow behavior. At the service level, this per-flow QoS concept has been implemented for instance in the policy and charging rules function (“PCRF”) and packet gateway (“P-GW”) today. At the flow endpoints, the QoS service-level agreement (“SLA”) is translated into an IP differentiated services code point (“DSCP”) value and IP queue requirements. The IP DSCP value is translated to an Ethernet precedence level and the IP Queue requirements are translated into the Ethernet queue requirements at the Ethernet level at the flow endpoints. However, when a packet is forwarded, the QoS SLA information and the queue requirements are not forwarded with the packets in the current connectionless model—only the IP DSCP value and the Ethernet precedence are forwarded. Therefore, without a connection-oriented control protocol, an issue exists regarding how consistent behaviors can be maintained within intermediate routers on queue management requirements.