EFFICIENT DISTRIBUTION OF SIGNALING MESSAGES IN A MOBILITY ACCESS GATEWAY OR LOCAL MOBILITY ANCHOR

摘要

A network element that acts as a local mobility anchor (LMA) in a communications network efficiently distributes signaling messages using a data plane and a control plane having a plurality of processes executing on a plurality of processing units. When a network connection ID of a received signaling message is not mapped to a host process in a steering table, the signaling message is sent to a process in the control plane. A second process is assigned to be the host process for the network connection, and the steering table is updated to indicate this assignment. Upon receipt of a second signaling message with the network connection ID, it is efficiently sent to the second process because of the updated steering table. A mobility access gateway (MAG) also utilizes a steering table with network connection ID to host process mappings to efficiently distribute signaling messages.