Current trends and perspectives in wireless virtualization

The objective of this paper is to survey and compare recent works in the field of wireless virtualization in order to identify potential applications, common trends and future research directions. First, this paper briefly summarizes different wireless virtualization architectures as well as both enabling and enabled technologies related to wireless virtualization. Then, this paper proposes a wireless virtualization classification based on the type of virtualized resources and the depth of slicing. The three main perspectives identified are data and flow-based perspective, protocol-based perspective and spectrum-based perspective. A hypothetical ecosystem scenario of a future virtualized wireless infrastructure in which these perspectives coexist is explored. Finally, the challenges and requirements of a sustainable wireless virtualization framework are discussed.