Converged Management in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks Based on Resource Virtualization

Dense heterogeneous networks (HetNets) are supposed to be one of the most inevitable modalities of future radio access networks (RAN). Though the deployment of dense HetNets would allow wireless networks to achieve high data rate, it also brings severe interference, frequent handover and increasing CAPEX and OPEX, etc. Hence, the convergence of different kinds of networks is becoming more and more urgent. In this paper, a converged management architecture for HetNets (CMA) based on resource virtualization is proposed. Considering the diversity of physical resources among different networks, we virtualize the heterogeneous resources into a unified 3-D resource particle, and introduce a virtual resource layer (VRL) into CMA to govern the virtual resources. And on this basis, the architecture and key technologies of CMA are presented. Moreover, we show that CMA could whittle traditional HetNets management down to the procedure of virtual resources allocation by demonstrating some use cases. In addition, the implementation issues of CMA are analyzed.