Handover Implementation in a 5G SDN-based Mobile Network Architecture Prados Garzón, Jonathan Adamuz Hinojosa, Óscar Ramón Ameigeiras Gutiérrez, Pablo José Ramos Muñoz, Juan José Andres-Maldonado, Pilar López Soler, Juan Manuel Handover 5G SDN NFV virtualized LTE/EPC This work is partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and the European Regional Development Fund (project TIN2013-46223-P), and the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport (FPU grant 13/04833). Requirements for 5G mobile networks includes a higher flexibility, scalability, cost effectiveness and energy efficiency. Towards these goals, Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization have been adopted in recent proposals for future mobile networks architectures because they are considered critical technologies for 5G. In this paper, we propose an X2-based handover implementation in an SDNbased and partially virtualized LTE architecture. Moreover, the architecture considered operates at link level, which provides lower latency and higher scalability. In our implementation, we use MPLS tunnels for user plane instead of GTP-U protocol, which introduces a significant overhead. To verify the correct operation of our system, we developed a simulator. It implements the messages exchange and processing of the primary network entities. Using this tool we measured the handover preparation and completion times, whose estimated values were roughly 6.94 ms and 8.31 ms, respectively, according to our experimental setup. These latencies meet the expected requirements concerning control plane delay budgets for 5G networks. 2021-04-29T11:54:47Z 2021-04-29T11:54:47Z 2016 conference output J. Prados-Garzon, O. Adamuz-Hinojosa, P. Ameigeiras, J. J. Ramos-Munoz, P. Andres-Maldonado and J. M. Lopez-Soler, "Handover implementation in a 5G SDN-based mobile network architecture," 2016 IEEE 27th Annual International Symposium on Personal, Indoor, and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC), 2016, pp. 1-6, doi: 10.1109/PIMRC.2016.7794936. http://hdl.handle.net/10481/68202 10.1109/PIMRC.2016.7794936 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/es/ open access Atribución-NoComercial-SinDerivadas 3.0 España IEEE