Addressing multiple virtual resources in the same geographical area

Abstract

This paper addresses the virtualisation of wireless access in order to provide the required capacity (data rate) to a Virtual Base Station (VBS). The approach is based on a Virtual Radio Resource Allocation algorithm, OnDemandVRRA, which manages the allocation of the physical radio resources to VBSs' end-users, in order to follow the contract and maintaining isolation among VBSs, according to the type of guarantees of the VBSs, the amount of contracted capacity, and VBSs' utilisation. Taking the variability of the wireless medium into account, the algorithm continuously influences the RRM mechanisms, namely admission control and MAC scheduling, to be aware of the VBSs' state relative to the service level agreement, in order to compensate for this variability. The algorithm has been tested to evaluate its behaviour, concerning the amount of VBSs created over a given geographical area served by a set of base stations. It can be concluded that changing the quantity of created VBSs as well as the contracted data rate in the cluster, GRT VBSs get their minimum contracted data rate. It is also verified that the best Radio resource Unit (RU) efficiency is achieved when the strategy for the overall capacity provision is to limit the capacity contracted by GRT VNets, overbooking the capacity contracted by BE VNets. In this case, the RU efficiency increases 30% comparing to the situation where the overbooking is done by GRT VBSs.