A framework for resources allocation in virtualised C-RAN

The vast growth in mobile data traffic with its increasing capacity demands necessitates investigating future solutions to cope with these challenges. Network Virtualisation is considered one potential solution to simplify the current wireless networks. Recently efforts have been made to show the performance gains of different resource allocation schemes in legacy LTE air interface virtualization. Moreover Cloud - based mobile networks are anticipated to play a significant role for next generation mobile networks. This paper investigates the potential deployment benefits of a novel resource virtualization algorithm (Traffic Aware Joint Scheduling) in Cloud-RANs (C-RAN). Air interface resources are coordinated and allocated dynamically by a hypervisor among different virtual operators (VOs). Three distinctive schemes are proposed and evaluated against standard Round Robin (RR) C-RAN scheduling. Simulation results show improvements in the throughput of the mobile video traffic and reduction in end-to-end delay for delay sensitive applications. In addition, an assessment of fairness guarantee is considered across all users. Note that this paper considers the impact of the proposed schemes on the transmission/data plane.