Information-Centric Virtualized Cellular Networks With Device-to-Device Communications

Information-centric wireless network virtualization enables the sharing of not only the infrastructure but also the content among different service providers, enabling the gain of not only virtualization but in-network caching as well. In this paper, we propose a novel framework with information-centric wireless virtualization and device-to-device (D2D) communications, which enables content caching not only in the air but in the mobile device as well. Moreover, the content is virtualized and can be shared by users from different virtual service providers. In this framework, we formulate the virtual resource allocation and caching strategies as a joint optimization problem, considering the gain of not only virtualization but of caching in the proposed information-centric wireless network virtualization architecture with D2D communications as well. In addition, to reduce computational complexity and signaling overhead, we propose a distributed algorithm to solve the formulated problem based on recent advances in alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), in which different parties only need to solve their own problems without the exchange of channel state information (CSI) with fast convergence rate. Extensive simulations are conducted with different system parameters to show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.