Tag Archives: S-GW

LTE EPC: Serving Gateway (S-GW) Basic Function

EPC, LTE, Mobile Networks, , , , ,

As our subscribers are mobile, moving between base stations / cells, the destination of the incoming GTP-U packets needs to be updated every time the subscriber moves from one cell to another.

If you’re not familiar with GTP take a read of this primer.

As we covered in the last post, the Packet Gateway (P-GW) handles decapsulating and encapsulating this traffic into GTP from external networks, and vise-versa. The Packet Gateway sends the traffic onto a Serving Gateway, that forwards the GTP-U traffic onto the eNodeB serving the user.

So why not just route the traffic from the Packet Gateway directly to the eNodeB?

As our users are inherently mobile, the signalling load to keep updating the destination of the incoming GTP-U traffic to the correct eNB, would put an immense load on the P-GW. So an intermediary gateway – the Serving Gateway (S-GW), is introduced.

The S-GW handles the mobility between cells, and takes the load of the P-GW. The P-GW just hands the traffic to a S-GW and let’s the S-GW handle the mobility.

It’s worth keeping in mind that most LTE connections are not “always on”. Subscribers (UEs) go into “Idle Mode”, in which the data connection and the radio connection is essentially paused, and able to be bought back at a moments notice (this allows us to get better battery life on the UE and better frequency utilisation).

When a user enters Idle Mode, an incoming packet needs to be buffered until the Subscriber/UE can get paged and come back online. Again this function is handled by the S-GW; buffering packets until the UE comes available then forwarding them on.

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Open5GS EPC: SGW selection by eNodeB ID / TAC

EPC, LTE, Mobile Networks, ,

Thanks to Kenny Barlee the Open5GS EPC MME now has the functionality to select which S-GW to send traffic to based on the Tracking Area Code of the eNodeB or the eNodeB ID.

This is a really useful Feature that allows you to break up your S-GW (And by extension P-GW) selection based on geographical areas.

This can be used to enable Local Breakout to a S/P-GW located at the same site as the tower, but controlled by a central MME / HSS.

After updating to the latest version the configuration is pretty straightforard,

P-GW Selection based on eNB ID

# o SGW selection by eNodeB ID (either single enb_id or multiple enb_ids, decimal or hex representation)
#
   selection_mode: enb_id
   gtpc:
     - addr: 127.0.2.3
       enb_id: [9413, 0x98765]

The above config will send any traffic from eNBs with the eNB ID 9413 (encoded as an intiger) or 0x98765 (Encoded as hex int equivilent 624485) to an S-GW at 127.0.2.3.

P-GW Selection based on TAC

# SGW selection by eNodeB TAC (either single TAC or multiple TACs)
#
selection_mode: tac
   gtpc:
     - addr: 127.0.2.2
       tac: [25000, 27000, 28000]

The above config will send any traffic from eNBs with TACs of 25000, 27000, 28000 to an S-GW at 127.0.2.2.

IMTx: NET02x (4G Network Essentials) – Mobility Management – 4. Changing MME and SGW

EPC, EUTRAN, LTE, Notes, RF, , ,

These are my lecture notes from IMT’s NET02x (4G Network Essentials) course, I thought I’d post them here as they may be useful to someone. You can find my complete notes here.

As we’ve seen earlier, the eNB needs a connection to an MME and a S-GW.

However different eNBs may connect to different S-GWs or different MMEs, and our UE may connect to any eNB, so we need a way to handover between S-GWs and MMEs.

Handover to new S-GW

Let’s take a look at a scenario where a UE is moving from one eNB to another, and each of the two eNBs is in a different S-GW.

At the start we have a connection from the MME to the S-GW, a GTP-C tunnel for control information and a GTP-U tunnel (called the S5/58 bearer) that carriers the user data over GTP-U between the P-GW and the S-GW.

As the UE moves to the eNB in TA2 we need the MME to modify the tunnel from the P-GW to the S-GW to change it from connecting the P-GW to the old S-GW and instead connecting the P-GW to the new S-GW.

The MME establishes a new tunnel for control to the new S-GW, and sends a message to the new S-GW to modify the tunnel from the P-GW to the old S-GW to point to the new S-GW.

Handover to new MME