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.

翻译：自蜂窝网络诞生以来，网络内移动性支持一直是其服务模型的关键特征。虽然这种方法为传统流量提供了无缝连接，但也带来了增大终端用户延迟、增加运营商复杂性和运营开销等副作用。然而，现代应用和传输协议对移动性的容忍度日益提高，这促使我们重新审视“移动性必须作为网络内服务提供”的假设。本文提出EnCoR（端到端核心与无线接入网），一种可部署的蜂窝网络架构，完全将移动性从核心网中移除。通过利用端到端移动性，EnCoR消除了基于隧道的IP锚定，同时保持与现有认证、计费及QoS技术的兼容性。我们证明EnCoR可与未经修改的手机协同工作，并在视频通话、语音通话及视频流等实际应用中提供与传统LTE网络等效的性能。研究表明，EnCoR不仅使网络运营商能够降低端到端延迟，而且基于FCC提供的蜂窝网络核心与边界路由器基础设施成本估算，与3GPP网络相比，其可为用户提供低延迟服务的资本成本降低超过90%。最后，我们证明这些收益是在减少整体切换控制信令量的同时实现的，使得EnCoR核心网在相同硬件约束下能够处理比LTE核心网更多的移动切换事件，在负载情况下实现2.6倍的切换延迟降低。