  The current Evolved Packet Core (EPC) 4th generation (4G) mobile network
architecture features complicated control plane protocols and requires
expensive equipment. Data delivery in the mobile packet core is performed based
on a centralized mobility anchor between eNode B (eNB) elements and the network
gateways. The mobility anchor is performed based on General Packet Radio
Service tunnelling protocol (GTP), which has numerous drawbacks, including high
tunnelling overhead and suboptimal routing between mobile devices on the same
network. To address these challenges, here we describe new mobile core
architecture for future mobile networks. The proposed scheme is based on IP
encapsulated within IP (IP-in-IP) for mobility management and data delivery. In
this scheme, the core network functions via layer 3 switching (L3S), and data
delivery is implemented based on IP-in-IP routing, thus eliminating the GTP
tunnelling protocol. For handover between eNB elements located near to one
another, we propose the creation of a tunnel that maintains data delivery to
mobile devices until the new eNB element updates the route with the gateway,
which prevents data packet loss during handover. For this, we propose Generic
Routing Encapsulation (GRE) tunnelling protocol. We describe the results of
numerical analyses and simulation results showing that the proposed network
core architecture provides superior performance compared with the current 4G
architecture in terms of handover delay, tunnelling overhead and total
transmission delay.
