EnCoR: An end-to-end architecture for simplifying cellular networks

TL;DR

EnCoR introduces an end-to-end cellular network architecture that removes in-network mobility support, significantly reducing latency and operational costs while maintaining compatibility with existing devices and applications.

Contribution

The paper presents EnCoR, a novel deployable architecture that eliminates core network mobility, lowering latency and costs without requiring modifications to user devices.

Findings

EnCoR achieves LTE-level performance for video and voice applications.

Network costs can be reduced by over 90% with EnCoR compared to traditional 3GPP networks.

Handover latency is reduced by 2.6 times under load with EnCoR.

Abstract

Since their creation, cellular networks have made in-network mobility support a key feature of their service model. While this approach provides seamless connectivity for legacy traffic, it has the side effects of inflating end-user latency and increasing complexity and operational overhead for operators. Yet modern applications and transport protocols are increasingly mobility tolerant, prompting us to revisit the assumption that mobility must be provided as an in-network service. In this paper, we propose EnCoR (End-to-End Core and RAN), a deployable cellular network architecture that removes mobility from the core entirely. Leveraging end-to-end mobility, EnCoR eliminates tunnel-based IP anchoring while preserving compatibility with existing authentication, charging, and QoS techniques. We demonstrate that EnCoR works with unmodified phones while providing equivalent performance as traditional LTE networks for real applications including video and voice calling and video streaming. We show that EnCoR not only allows network operators to reduce end to end latency, but can also reduce the capital cost of providing low latency service to users by more than 90% compared to 3GPP networks, based on cost estimates for cellular network core and border router infrastructure provided by the FCC. Finally, we demonstrate that these gains are achieved while reducing the amount of overall handover control messaging, allowing the EnCoR core network to handle a greater number of mobility handover events than an LTE core under identical hardware constraints, achieving a 2.6x lower handover latency under load.