Software-Defined Device-to-Device (D2D) Communications in Virtual Wireless Networks With Imperfect Network State Information (NSI)

Abstract

Software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) are a promising system architecture and control mechanism for future networks. Although some works have been done on wireless SDN and NFV, recent advancements in device-to-device (D2D) communications are largely ignored in this novel framework. In this paper, we study the integration of D2D communication in the framework of SDN and NFV. An inherent challenge in supporting software-defined D2D is the imperfectness of network state information, including channel state information (CSI) and queuing state information, in virtual wireless (QSI) networks. To address this challenge, we formulate the resource sharing problem in this framework as a discrete stochastic optimization problem and develop discrete stochastic approximation algorithms to solve this problem. Such algorithms can reduce the computational complexity compared with exhaustive search while achieving satisfactory performance. Both the static wireless channel and time-varying channels are considered. Extensive simulations show that users can benefit from both wireless network virtualization and software-defined D2D communications, and our proposed scheme can achieve considerable performance gains in both system throughput and user utility under practical network settings.