UFA : Ultra Flat Architecture for High Bitrate Services in mobile networks

International audience ; The challenge in the coming years for mobile networks will be to offer high bitrate data services to customers in mobility. Future mobile architectures currently under standardization, solely based on IP, are designed to bring more capacity on wireless interface. However they are not scalable and could will not handle IP traffic growth because of their centralized nature. This paper proposes a new architecture, called Ultra Flat Architecture (UFA), aiming at solving scalability issues. The key idea of UFA is the reduction of the number of network nodes number to only one node, by the distribution of their related user and control plane functions into the base stations. We detail UFA architecture and show how it optimizes service establishment and mobility procedures. We perform an analytical evaluation of the solution performance and expose the first requirements that guarantee seamless handover for real-time services