R-Cloud: A cloud framework for enabling Radio-as-a-Service over a wireless substrate

Inspired by the success of use of Virtual Machines (VMs) in cloud computing, virtualization has been introduced to wireless networking recently, enabling support for multiple Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs) via isolated slices over a shared wireless substrate. In this paper, we present design, implementation and evaluation of a novel cloud framework, R-Cloud, to enable radio resources at Base Stations (BSs) to be effectively allocated to multiple MVNOs as a service, which is referred to as Radio-as-a-Service (RaaS). R-Cloud employs a hybrid two-level control framework to enable coarse-grained and fine-grained resource allocation at the cloud and BS levels respectively. Specifically, R-Cloud not only coordinates resource allocation among BSs, MVNOs and mobile users across a Radio Access Network (RAN) and enables performance isolation by optimizing resource sharing and user association using an LP-rounding based algorithm at the cloud level; but also effectively schedule transmissions among multiple users at a BS using an optimal scheduling policy. We implemented R-Cloud over a wireless network testbed with software defined radios. It has been shown by extensive experimental and simulation results that R-Cloud can achieve effective RaaS over wireless networks and the proposed resource allocation algorithms outperform widely-used baseline solutions.