Patent ID: 8873398
Filing Date: 2014-10-28
Classification: H04L,H04W

Abstract:
1. A method for implementing a control plane of an evolved packet core (EPC) of a third generation partnership project (3GPP) long term evolution (LTE) network in a cloud computing system, the cloud computing system including a cloud manager and a controller, the controller to execute a plurality of control plane modules including a mobility management entity (MME) module, policy and charging rules function (PCRF) module, home subscriber server (HSS) module, control plane parts of a serving gateway (S-GW-C) module, and control plane parts of a PDN gateway (P-GW-C) module, the control plane to communicate with the data plane of the EPC implemented outside of the cloud computing system in a plurality of network elements of the 3GPP LTE network through a control protocol, the data plane of the EPC including data plane parts of the serving gateway (S-GW-D) and data plane parts of the PDN gateway (P-GW-D), the EPC with the control plane implemented in the cloud computing system utilizing resources more efficiently than an architecture with the control plane implemented in the plurality of network elements of the 3GPP LTE network, the method comprising the steps of: initializing the plurality of control plane modules of the EPC within the controller, each control plane module in the plurality of control plane modules initialized as a separate virtual machine by the cloud manager, each control plane module to provide a set of control plane functions for managing the data plane; monitoring, by the cloud manager, resource utilization of each control plane module and the control plane traffic handled by each control plane module; detecting, by the cloud manager, a threshold level of resource utilization or traffic load for one of the plurality of control plane modules of the EPC; and initializing a new control plane module as a separate virtual machine by the cloud manager in response to detecting the threshold level, the new control plane module to share the load of the one of the plurality of control plane modules; configuring, by the controller, each network element in the plurality of network elements to extend an OpenFlow table to include a general packet radio service (GPRS) tunneling protocol (GTP) header and GTP tunnel endpoint identifier to support forwarding of GTP session flows.