The Case for Virtualized Wireless Access Networks

Densely populated areas such as city centers are often sprinkled with numerous wireless access points operated for commercial or private use. Together they create what's known as tragedy of the commons phenomenon: without proper coordination, a signi cant amount of license-exempt radio frequency resources is wasted due to contention at shared medium access. In this paper we argue that both commercial and private operators would bene t if their access points were enabled to cooperate and form a single virtual access network that manages available radio resources itself in a globally optimal way. On top of this virtual network, each operator would then allocate resource shares for his own disposal. As a rst step towards this vision we then present a distributed algorithm and protocol that allows previously unrelated access points to form and manage a single network in a self-organized manner and demonstrate its e ectiveness.