AppRAN: Application-oriented radio access network sharing in mobile networks

As a promising way to increase network capacity and reduce expenses, radio access network (RAN) sharing among mobile (virtual) network operators, has attracted extensive recent attention from both industry and academia. Meanwhile, mobile systems are undergoing fast evolution to virtualized infrastructure so as to tackle the ever-growing mobile traffic and the unremitting demand for high data rates. However, existing RAN sharing models intend to expose resource details, e.g., infrastructure and spectrum, to participating network operators of the RAN for resource-sharing purposes, which violates the principles of network abstraction and makes network management even more complicated. This paper presents AppRAN, an application-oriented framework for RAN sharing in mobile networks, which decouples network operators from radio resource by providing application-level services with Quality of Service (QoS) guarantee. AppRAN defines a serial of abstract applications with distinct QoS requirements and periodically computes application-level resource allocation for each radio element at a central controller w.r.t. traffic demands and average channel condition. The radio elements are allowed to independently determine flow-level resource allocation within each application afterwards. We formulate the application-level resource allocation as an optimization problem and develop a fast algorithm to solve it with a provably approximate guarantee. The efficacy of AppRAN is validated through theoretical analysis and computer simulations. We show that AppRAN is in line with the design of software-defined RAN.