Wireless access virtualisation: Addressing virtual resources with different types of requirements

Abstract

This paper addresses wireless capacity sharing by means of wireless access virtualisation, allowing to provide the required capacity to a set of differentiated Virtual Base Stations (VBSs) instantiated within a geographical area. An algorithm to manage the allocation of radio resources from different radio access technologies to the VBSs, OnDemandVRRA, is proposed. The main target is to provide the required capacity to the VBSs, according to the type of guarantees and their usage, maintaining isolation among them. Taking into account the variability of the wireless channel, the proposed algorithm continuously influences Radio Resource Management, namely admission control and MAC scheduling, to be aware of the VBSs' state relative to the service level agreement. The algorithm has been tested to evaluate its behaviour concerning the existence of a different mixing of VBSs' types in the physical cluster. From simulation results, it can be concluded that, independently of the percentage of each VBSs type instantiated in the physical cluster, just minor differences are perceived for the metrics being used, e.g., the maximum deviation of the Average Cluster Serving Data Rate as a function of the number of guaranteed VBSs is about 0.7%.