Augmented RAN with SDN Orchestration of Multi-tenant Base Stations

Network virtualization (NV) has been successfully applied in wired networks, providing abstraction of the networking equipment and simplifying the network/resource management procedures. However, more light needs to be shed on how the emerging NV technologies, including software defined networking and network function virtualization, can be used by the mobile network operators to efficiently handle the ever-increasing demand for mobile data traffic. In this paper, we focus on the long term evolution system and present a NV-based framework that aims at bringing the access network closer to the end user. The proposed framework enables the dynamic sharing of base stations and radio resources among different mobile network operators, a.k.a. multi-tenant operation. Accordingly, we present novel NV triggering and decision algorithms to demonstrate how the proposed dynamic sharing of base stations can be deployed based on predefined service level agreements. Extensive system-level simulations accompany the paper, showing that, even with the use of simple NV triggering and decision algorithms, the proposed framework results in notable performance improvements at the users of the home operator, i.e. the sending operator, without significantly affecting the performance of the users at the host operator, i.e. the operator that shares its infrastructure.