Dynamic slicing for mobile network infrastructures: Challenges, opportunities and business aspects

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm provides many features including hardware abstraction, programmable networking and centralized policy control to networks. In the next generation mobile networks, one of the main benefits that can be used along with these features is core/backhaul SDN-based network virtualization. In this article, we propose a novel shared SDN-based Evolved Packet System (EPS) architecture where a network virtualization controller is utilized to ensure dynamic slicing and sharing of mobile core and backhaul networks among several Mobile Operators (MOs). In the proposed architecture, infrastructure owner that owns the SDN-based network infrastructure can exploit network virtualization benefits of SDN by formulating an appropriate evolved NodeBs (eNodeBs) assignment mechanism among MOs as a consequence of core/backhaul network virtualization. This mechanism uses various scheduling algorithms based on the instantaneous traffic demands of MOs while guaranteeing their own quality-of-service (QoS) requirements. In respect to this, we investigate the performance of shared architecture with the use of both QoS-aware and QoS-unaware schedulers through Monte Carlo simulations and compare them with traditional EPS of Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks in terms of fairness, capacity and satisfied-MO-ratio and the challenges, opportunities and business perspectives of our proposed architecture are addressed as well.