Cell Virtualization with Network Partition for Initial User Association in Software Defined Small-cell Networks

Abstract

In recent years, dense small cell network has been deployed to address the challenge that has resulted from the unprecendented growth of mobile data traffic and users. It has proven to be a cost efficeient solution to offload traffic from macro-cells. Software defined heterogeneous wireless network can decouple the control plane from the data plane. The control signal goes through the macro-cell while the data traffic can be offloaded by small cells. In this paper, we propose a framework for cell virtualization and user association in order to satisfy versatile requirements of multiple tenants. In the proposed framework, we propose an interference graph partioning based virtual-cell association and customized physical-cell association for multi-homed users in a software defined small cell network. The proposed user association scheme includes 3 steps: initialization, virtual-cell association and physical-cell association. Simulation results show that the proposed virtual-cell association outperforms the other schemes. For physical-cell association, the results on resource utilization and user fairness are examined for mobile users and infrastructure providers.