Wireless Resources Virtualization for Cloud Radio Access Networks (C-RAN)

The cloud radio access network (C-RAN) concept is a strong candidate for next-generation wireless networks due to its flexibility, scalability, increased asset utilization, and energy savings. While resources are centralized in C-RAN architecture, wireless resource virtualization (WRV) can offer substantial capacity increase and efficiency gain. This paper provides solutions for virtualizing C-RANs wireless resources and sharing them between multiple mobile network operators (MNOs). The proposed solutions dynamically allocate wireless resources to users who subscribe to MNOs across the network. In addition, the proposed solutions maintain a high level of isolation between different MNOs, provide efficient and fair resource utilization, enable different scheduling polices, and manage intercell interference (ICI). An optimal solution is formulated as a combinatorial problem, which is computationally expensive. Consequently, two lowcomplexity suboptimal solutions with comparable performance are provided. The optimal and suboptimal solutions are compared in terms of complexity and performance. The optimal solution outperforms the suboptimal by only 6% at the expense of a significantly higher time complexity. Keywords—Wireless resource virtualization, C-RAN, ICI management, resource allocation.