An Approach to 5G Wireless Network Virtualization: Architecture and Trial Environment

The 5G wireless network which is regarded as the future critical infrastructure, is faced with many formidable challenges. To deal with them, resource sharing is the trend, including sharing the wireless resources and the infrastructure. Thus, the wireless network virtualization has been raised to integrate and abstract the resources and make network management more flexible. In this paper, a wireless network virtualization architecture is designed, which consists of the cognitive plane, the control plane and the data plane. These three planes collaborate to optimize the resource allocation according to the network condition. Then, we introduce the cell clustering method in the proposed architecture, which can largely reduce the complexity of resource slicing and make it possible in wireless network. Finally, we have implemented a trial environment to test the architecture. The test data indicate the network performance is obviously improved. Spectrum efficiency is doubled and the packet loss rate reduces to 1/20.