Inter-Tenant Resource Sharing and Power Allocation in 5G Virtual Networks

Recently, the concept of network virtualization and network slicing attracted significant attention from both industry and academia as a key component of the evolving 5G architecture to allow the efficient entrance of vertical industries and tackle increased aggregate traffic by flexible network re-configurability. However, the potential price to be paid for facilitating network slicing in a multi-tenant virtual network is the underutilization of the scarce wireless network resources due to the different tenant requirements and the inherent dynamics of the traffic. A potential way to avoid such sacrifice of radio resources is to allow efficient inter-tenant resource sharing. To this end, this paper proposes a novel optimization framework for flexible inter-tenant resource sharing embedded with transmission power control to aggressively improve network capacity, the utilization of wireless access resources, user data rate as well as energy efficiency. More specifically, we define two novel resource sharing mechanisms called tight coupling and loose coupling, respectively, via mixed integer linear programming formulations. Furthermore, two resource and power joint allocation algorithms are designed to solve the optimization problem in polynomial time. Based on 3GPP network parameterization, a rigorous analysis via a wide set of numerical investigations reveal that significant gains in network throughput, individual user rate, and energy efficiency can be achieved compared with current baseline network slicing methods and constant power resource sharing algorithms.