Efficient deployment of mobility management entity (MME) with stateful geo-redundancy

Abstract

This disclosure describes a method to provide stateful geographic redundancy for the LTE MME (Mobility Management Entity) function of the 3GPP E-UTRAN Evolved Packet core (EPC). The method provides MME many-to-one (“n:1”) stateful redundancy by building upon the S1-Flex architecture, which enables a MME Pool Area to be defined as an area within which a UE (User Equipment) may be served without need to change the serving MME. Geographic redundancy is achieved by utilizing a standby MME node deployed to backup a pool of MME nodes, with the standby MME node designed to handle the large volume of journaling or synchronization messages from all the MME nodes in the pool. The standby MME node takes over the personality and responsibility of any MME node in the pool that has failed, with minimal impact to subscribers that were being served by that failed MME node.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.