Scalable Virtualization and Offloading-Based Software-Defined Architecture for Heterogeneous Statistical QoS Provisioning Over 5G Multimedia Mobile Wireless Networks

As a crucial step moving towards the next generation of super-fast wireless networks, recently the fifth-generation (5G) mobile wireless networks have received a plethora of research attention and efforts from both the academia and industry. The 5G mobile wireless networks are expected to provision distinct delay-bounded quality of service (QoS) guarantees for a wide range of multimedia services, applications, and users with extremely diverse requirements. However, how to efficiently support multimedia services over 5G wireless networks has imposed many new challenging issues not encountered before in the fourth-generation wireless networks. To overcome these new challenges, we propose a novel network-function virtualization and mobile-traffic offloading based software-defined network (SDN) architecture for heterogeneous statistical QoS provisioning over 5G multimedia mobile wireless networks. Specifically, we develop the novel SDN architecture to scalably virtualize wireless resources and physical infrastructures, based on user's locations and requests, into three types of virtual wireless networks: virtual networks without offloading, virtual networks with WiFi offloading, and virtual networks with device-to-device offloading. We derive the optimal transmit power allocation schemes to maximize the aggregate effective capacity, overall spectrum efficiency, and other related performances for these three types of virtual wireless networks. We also derive the scalability improvements of our proposed three integrated virtual networks. Finally, we validate and evaluate our developed schemes through numerical analyses, showing significant performance improvements as compared with other existing schemes.