A Framework for Joint Wireless Network Virtualization and Cloud Radio Access Networks for Next Generation Wireless Networks

Wireless network virtualization (WNV) and cloud radio access networks (CRANs) are promising technologies with the potential to be game changing for the fifth generation (5G) wireless networks. In particular, these technologies may have significant impact on the capital expenditure, quality of service provisioning, as well as spectral efficiency in 5G networks. These two technologies are mostly considered separately in previous works. This paper, however, investigates both the gains and requirements of integrating WNV with CRAN. In this paper, we propose WNV schemes for CRAN, where the objective is to maximize the overall system throughput and minimize delay. The proposed schemes are designed to maintain a high level of isolation between mobile network operators (MNOs), which allows the deployment of different scheduling polices by different MNOs, and managing intercell interference, which may lead to significant throughput gain. Overall, the results presented in this paper reveal that a joint CRAN-WNV architecture can be highly efficient when MNOs have unbalanced loads, because MNOs with high loads can seamlessly access the underutilized resources of underloaded MNOs. The throughput gain in unbalanced loads can be as much as 50% using optimal sharing schemes when compared with static sharing, and about 18% when compared with the WNV without CRAN. The resource allocation problem in the joint CRAN-WNV is formulated, and both optimal and low complexity suboptimal solutions are derived. The obtained results show that integrating the two technologies in a joint architecture can significantly improve the network performance. However, reducing the complexity by adopting efficient sharing techniques may have tangible impact on the throughput when compared with optimal sharing.