Mobile Virtual Network Operators Research Articles

The Recent Evolution in EU MNO Telecom Mergers

The European mobile telecoms industry bears a heavy burden. It is tasked by the European Digital Single Market Strategy to invest in an environment where digital networks and services flourish,1 play an important part of our daily lives, remain at a fair price,2 and maintain its competitiveness against US and Asian rivals. All under public and political scrutiny policed by the European Commission and national competition authorities. In the last two years, the Commission has had ample opportunity to scrutinise and develop its assessment of mobile telecom deals with further consolidations across Europe. In a number of high-profile deals concerning mobile network operators (MNOs), the Commission prohibited a merger between two MNOs in the United Kingdom (May 2016),3 cleared a merger between two MNOs subject to remedies in Italy (September 2016),4 and unconditionally cleared the acquisition of a Swedish Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO5) by an MNO (October 2016).6 In addition, the Commission investigated a merger between MNOs on the Danish market, but the parties withdrew their notification in light of the Commission’s opposition.7

A Biological Model for Resource Allocation and User Dynamics in Virtualized HetNet

Virtualization technology is considered an effective measure to enhance resource utilization and interference management via radio resource abstraction in heterogeneous networks (HetNet). The critical challenge in wireless virtualization is virtual resource allocation on which substantial works have been done. However, most existing researches on virtual resource allocation focus on improving total utility. Different from the existing works, we investigate the dynamic‐aware virtual radio resource allocation in virtualization based HetNet considering utility and fairness. A virtual radio resource management framework is proposed, where the radio resources of different physical networks are virtualized into a virtual resource pool and mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) compete for virtual resources from the pool to provide service to users. A virtual radio resource allocation algorithm based on biological model is developed, considering system utility, fairness, and dynamics. Simulation results are provided to verify that the proposed virtual resource allocation algorithm not only converges within a few iterations, but also achieves a better trade‐off between total utility and fairness than existing algorithm. Besides, it can also be utilized to analyze the population dynamics of system.

Full-Duplex Aided User Virtualization for Mobile Edge Computing in 5G Networks

Driven by the increasing demand of intensive computing services and the resource limitation of mobile devices at the edge of mobile networks, mobile edge computing (MEC) is concerned with being an emerging paradigm towards the 5G communications. A main issue of MEC is the coordination of communication, computation, and storage. In this paper, we propose a novel MEC framework with a user virtualization scheme in the software-defined network virtualization cellular network, in which radio resources are virtualized along with computation and storage resources to cooperatively finish MEC services. Besides, we introduce the user virtualization assisted by the full-duplex communication which can extend the radio resource of wireless networks and provide the potential to increase system performance. Moreover, enabled by user virtualization, users can offload the edge computation tasks directly to the MEC server implemented at infrastructure providers or via the virtualized mobile device attributed to different mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs). Under this MEC framework, we formulate the virtual resource allocation as a joint optimization problem. A distributed resource allocation algorithm based on an alternating direction method of multipliers is proposed which can reduce computational complexity and signaling overhead. We evaluate the proposed algorithm through extensive simulations, and the results show that the total utility of MVNOs can be improved significantly which benefited from user virtualization.

Joint Resource Allocation and Content Caching in Virtualized Content-Centric Wireless Networks

Efficient content caching plays a crucial role in quality of service enhancement and congestion mitigation of the backhaul and core networks for the fifth-generation (5G) wireless network, which must support a large amount of multimedia and video content. Wireless network virtualization provides a novel paradigm shift in 5G system design which enables to better utilize network resources, rapid development of new services, and reduce the operation cost. Harmonized deployment of a content caching strategy in the virtualized wireless network environment, however, requires a suitable radio resource allocation framework to realize the great benefits of these technologies. In this paper, we study the joint resource allocation and content caching problem which aims to efficiently utilize the radio and content storage resources in the highly congested backhaul scenario. In this design, we minimize the maximum content request rejection rate experienced by users of different mobile virtual network operators in different cells, which results in a mixed-integer non-linear program. We solve this difficult optimization problem by proposing a bisection-search-based algorithm that iteratively optimizes the resource allocation and content caching placement. We further propose a low-complexity heuristic algorithm which achieves moderate performance loss compared to the bisection-search based algorithm. Extensive numerical results confirm the efficacy of our proposed framework which significantly reduces the maximum request outage probability compared with other benchmark algorithms.

Double Auction Based Multi-Flow Transmission in Software-Defined and Virtualized Wireless Networks

The explosively growing demands for mobile traffic services bring both challenges and opportunities to wireless networks. Wireless network virtualization is proposed as the main evolution path toward the forthcoming fifth generation (5G) cellular networks. In this paper, we propose a software defined and virtualized (SDV) wireless network architecture for enabling multi-flow transmission with multiple infrastructure providers (InPs) and multiple mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs). In order to ensure the heterogeneity, we formulate the virtual resource allocation problem with diverse QoS requirements as a social welfare maximization problem with distance-related transaction cost. Due to hidden information of InPs and MVNOs for the auctioneer, we introduce a shadow price for ensuring desirable economic properties and total welfare for the system. Simulations are conducted with different system configurations to show the effectiveness and the energy efficiency performance of the proposed SDV wireless network framework and iterative double auction mechanism.

Modelling and implementation of virtual radio resources management for 5G Cloud RAN

The virtualisation of Radio Access Networks (RANs) is one of the goals in designing 5G mobile networks. This paper aims at presenting a proof of concept for the virtualisation of radio resources using Open Air Interface (OAI), a software-based Long-Term Evolution (LTE) eNodeB physical emulator. OAI was extended to support multi-tenancy, representing diverse Virtual mobile Network Operators (VNOs) with different Service Level Agreements (SLAs). A comprehensive analytical model for managing the virtual radio resources has been proposed, with two key parts: estimation of available radio resources and their allocation to different VNOs. The estimation is performed by the model, and the allocation is managed by OAI scheduling. Various scenarios and use cases are studied in this virtual RAN environment, network performance being evaluated for different situations, by varying guaranteed levels, serving weights, and used services. Results show that the proposed approach offers almost the same capacity to guaranteed VNOs regardless of other existing VNOs, experiencing at worst a degradation of 32% of its initial allocated data rate, without violation of the guaranteed data rate. The data rate allocated to best effort VNOs may decrease up to 7% of its initial value, which is acceptable, to guarantee other more demanding SLAs.

Information-Centric Wireless Networks with Virtualization and D2D Communications

Wireless network virtualization and ICN are two promising technologies for next generation wireless networks. Although some excellent works have focused on these two technologies, D2D communications have not been investigated in information-centric virtualized cellular networks. Meanwhile, content caching in mobile devices has attracted much attention due to the saved backhaul consumption or reduced transmission latency in D2D-assisted cellular networks. However, when it comes to the multi-operator scenario, direct content sharing between different operators via D2D communications is typically infeasible. In this article, we propose a novel information-centric virtualized cellular network framework with D2D communications, enabling not only content caching in the air, but also inter-operator content sharing between mobile devices. We describe the key components in the proposed framework, and present the interactions among them. We incorporate and formulate the content caching strategies in resource allocation optimization, to maximize the total utility of mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) by caching popular content in mobile devices. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework and scheme with different system parameters.

Sensitivity Analysis on Service-Driven Network Planning

Service providers are expected to play an increasingly central role in the mobile market and their relationship with the traditional mobile network operators (MNOs) is starting to change. The dilemma faced by over-the-top service-providers (OTTs) is now whether to enter into a service level agreement with the MNOs (in the same spirit of mobile virtual network operator agreements) or to invest in deploying their own network infrastructure to serve their demand. The purpose of this paper is to study the factors shaping the agreements between OTTs and MNOs and how these factors impact network planning decisions. To this end, we build a synthetic model of cellular network deployment that explores how traditional mobile operators and OTTs compete in deploying new infrastructure. Using our model in conjunction with real-world data, we find that service-driven networks are heavily influenced by regulatory decisions, and that cost structures and demand characteristics play non-marginal roles in the definition of service-driven networks.

Competition Aspects of Digital Financial Services

This study enumerates a sampling of competition issues stemming primarily from access to, and the use of technology in, the digital financial services (DFS) ecosystem from the perspective of its stakeholders. Stakeholders include regulators, technical service providers and aggregators, payment switches, agent networks, mobile network operators (MNOs), independent banks, payment service provider (PSP)-affiliated banks, MNO-affiliated banks, MNO-affiliated PSPs, mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs), and independent PSPs. Market imbalances may result from unequal policy frameworks or from market conduct. The former may be from regulatory bans on or restricted access to: DFS ecosystems; disproportionate and unequal compliance and capital requirements; and inconsistent and disproportionate tax regimes. The latter could relate to a market participant’s access to fair reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms to technology; critical and scarce infrastructure, services used for channel or wholesale access, discriminatory pricing of services, cross-subsidization of services, quality of service, and access to big data. The report outlines competition issues that have been identified by the author based on publicly available and ventilated examples and studies of DFS ecosystems worldwide, as of January 2017. Insights from market participants, analysts, and regulators participating in the ITU Focus Group on DFS are also included. Regulatory capacities and potential types of interventions to deal with these and other related competition and market balance concerns are detailed, as are the technical and commercial methods that have been employed by market participants to deal with competition-related issues in the absence of regulatory intervention. Country examples are from: Bangladesh, China, Colombia, Georgia, Ghana, India, Jordan, Kenya, Malawi, Mexico, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. In some instances, multiple competition-related issues in the DFS ecosystem in a country may manifest.

Enabling Radio-as-a-Service With Truthful Auction Mechanisms

We envision that in the near future, just as Infrastructure-as-a-Service, radios, and radio resources in a wireless network can also be provisioned as a service to mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs), which we refer to as Radio-as-a-Service (RaaS) . A major obstacle for wide adoption of RaaS is the lack of incentives and fairness for allocating radio resources among MVNOs. In this paper, we present a novel auction-based model to enable fair pricing and fair resource allocation according to real-time needs of MVNOs for RaaS. Based on the proposed model, we study the auction mechanism design with the objective of maximizing social welfare. First, we present an integer linear programming and Vickrey–Clarke–Groves-based auction mechanism for obtaining optimal social welfare. To reduce time complexity, we present a polynomial-time greedy mechanism for the RaaS auction. Both methods have been formally shown to be truthful and individually rational. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed greedy auction mechanism can quickly produce close-to-optimal solutions. Furthermore, to prevent winning bidders from making 0 payment, we introduce reserve prices, and present auction mechanisms with reserve prices, which are shown to be truthful and individually rational too.

Towards the Successful Deployment of 5G in Europe: Two Contrasting Scenarios

European policy makers have shown a keen interest in the success of 5G because ubiquitous and high capacity electronic communication infrastructure is recognized as a cornerstone of economic development and productivity growth. The second generation, GSM, is considered the leading example, reaching its peak in deployment in 2015 with 3.83 billion subscribers served through over 700 operators in 219 countries and territories. With 5G rapidly shaping up in the R&D and standardization environment, what are the lessons to be learned from 1G through 4G that should be taken into account to ensure a leadership role? What does 5G have in common with previous generations and where is it different? Is the path towards the future predetermined or are there alternative routes? When there are multiple futures with different outcomes which one is more desirable? In summary, what would be the policy and regulatory framework required to enable leadership with 5G in Europe? To respond to these questions this contribution identifies first the policy and regulatory lessons to be drawn from the success of GSM. Secondly, this contribution describes two stylized images of possible futures of 5G, ‘Evolution’ and ‘Revolution’. These reflect two extremes in terms of possible futures of 5G. ‘Evolution’ follows the pattern of previous generations and current trends. ‘Revolution’ represents a clear break with these trends and a path towards leadership with 5G, as it exploits the opportunities of standardized APIs for service creation, being enabled by network virtualization as an architectural foundation of 5G. These open APIs allow the market entry of a multitude of virtual mobile network operators (VMNOs) serving particular industry verticals or economic sectors with tailored feature sets and qualities of services.

Application-Specific Slicing for MVNO and Traffic Characterization [Invited

In this paper, we apply the concept of a software-defined data plane to defining new services for mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) to empower them with the capability of tailoring fine-grained subscription plans that can meet users' demands. For this purpose, we have recently proposed the concept of application-and/ or device-specific slicing that classifies application-and/or device-specific traffic into slices and introduced various applications of our proposed system [Optical Fiber Communication Conf. (OFC), 2016, paper Th3I.4]. This paper reports the prototype implementation of the proposal into a real MVNO connecting customized smartphones so we can identify applications/devices from the given traffic with 100% accuracy. We first characterize the traffic patterns of popular applications to build a detailed understanding of how network resources are utilized for real users and applications and what their demands on different network resources are. Then, we classify traffic according to the devices and find that the flow characteristics of LTE RAN slices are very similar to those of 3G. We discover that most of the bandwidth is consumed by those flows with the duration of several hundreds of seconds, and the flow size is larger than 5 Mbytes in both LTE and 3G MVNO networks.

Feasibility Study to Evaluate the Potential Entry of a New F-MVNO into the Spanish Mobile Market

The mobile market until a decade ago had been composed mainly of Mobile Network Operators (MNOs). To promote greater competition in this market the European Commission (EC) has promoted various actions in the regulatory and policy environment in Europe. This has significantly facilitated the appearance of new players in this market, such as Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs), which in the case of the Spanish mobile market grew from 4 MNOs to 38 non-homogeneous operators by early 2017. This paper presents an assessment of the economic feasibility of the entry of a new Full-Mobile Virtual Network Operator (F-MVNO) in the Spanish mobile market. This operator does not own band rights and therefore has to negotiate with a host operator (HO) for use of spectrum and has to provide the suitable and necessary devices that route and switch calls. Moreover, it has to ensure the interoperability of its own services with other operators and has to manage the services and traffic generated by its own subscribers. The examples of evaluation analyzed in this work consider six different scenarios over five years. The evaluation for each scenario calculates the average return per user (ARPU) or the income per subscriber and the fixed and variable costs needed to provide the proposed services. The data used in this evaluation are provided by the National Commission for Markets and Competition, NCMC or “la Comision Nacional de los Mercados y la Competencia, CNMC” in Spain [1], which is in charge of publishing quarterly the available data about the Spanish mobile market. The results show for each scenario the minimum number of subscribers that a new F-MVNO needs to ensure its economic feasibility (break-even point) and the time necessary to reach it. The methodology used in this work may also serve as a guide to assess the economic feasibility of new F-MVNOs entering in other European countries.

Resource Allocation for Virtualized Wireless Networks with Backhaul Constraints

In this letter, we study resource allocation for wireless virtualized networks considering both the backhaul capacity of the infrastructure provider (InP) and the users’ quality-of-service (QoS) requirements. We focus on the profit gained by a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), which is a middleman who buys physical resource from the InP, bundling them into virtual resources called slides before selling off the service providers. The objective of the MVNO is to maximize its profit while guaranteeing the backhaul constraint and users’ QoS by jointly allocating the slices and the uplink transmit power to the users. To solve the formulated mixed integer non-convex problem, we propose a distributed solution framework based on Lagrangian relaxation to a find suboptimal decision about slice and transmit power allocations. We further propose a low-complexity solution based on the concept of a matching game that does not require any global information. Numerical results are provided to evaluate the performance of the proposed schemes.

Design of an Innovative Business Model for Mobile Virtual Network Operators

Purpose: The article studies a possible innovative business model for sustainable competitive advantage in current communication technologies.Methodology/Approach: This ethnographic approach consists of contextual interviews with company managers and specialists. Scientific observation and comparison took preference over other methods for the evaluation of results. Comparison methods were used for comparing price levels of telecommunication services within OECD countries and used for characterizing virtual operators.This method of modelling was applied to both corporate process-design and functions.Findings: This paper proposes a normative model as the foundation for a virtual operator that would be generally applicable by any potential newcomer to the budding virtual telecommunication market.Research Limitation: Business model innovation in the virtual mobile operator area is a quite new concept, which is still under development. For that reason the validation of the model has not been fully completed until now.Originality/Value of paper: The paper demonstrates this quite new approach to business model development and its possible application in the area of virtual mobile operators.

Virtual Resource Allocation in Software-Defined Information-Centric Cellular Networks With Device-to-Device Communications and Imperfect CSI

In this paper, we propose an architecture of software-defined information-centric network virtualization with device-to-device (D2D) communications, which facilitates dynamic virtual resource allocation and content caching via a software-defined networking (SDN) controller with a global view of the system. In our proposed framework, substrate physical resources can be virtualized and shared among multiple mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs). Meanwhile, by means of integrating D2D communications into information-centric wireless networks, content caching is enabled not only in the air but in mobile devices as well. In addition, taking into consideration inaccurate channel estimation and measurement, we formulate the virtual resource allocation and caching optimization as a discrete stochastic optimization problem in which imperfect channel state information is incorporated. Because the formulated virtual resource allocation problem is a large-scale combinational optimization problem, we exploit discrete stochastic approximation approaches to cope with it. Finally, extensive simulations are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme with different system parameters. Simulation results show that MVNOs can benefit from not only the sharing of physical infrastructure but from the caching functionality that exists in both the air and mobile devices as well.

Auction–Stackelberg game framework for access permission in femtocell networks with multiple network operators

With the explosive growth of indoor data traffic in forthcoming fifth generation cellular networks, it is imperative for mobile network operators to improve network coverage and capacity. Femtocells are widely recognized as a promising technology to address these demands. As femtocells are sold or loaned by a mobile network operator (MNO) to its residential or enterprise customers, MNOs usually employ refunding scheme to compensate the femtocell holders (FHs) providing indoor access to other subscribers by configuring the femtocell to operate in open or hybrid access mode. Due to the selfishness nature, competition between network operators as well as femtocell holders makes it challenging for operators to select appropriate FHs for trading access resources. This inspires us to develop an effective refunding framework, with aim to improve overall network resource utilization, through promoting FHs to make reasonable access permission for well-matched macro users. In this paper, we develop a two-stage auction–Stackelberg game (ASGF) framework for access permission in femtocell networks, where MNO and mobile virtual network operator lease access resources from multiple FHs. We first design an auction mechanism to determine the winner femtocell that fulfils the access request of macro users. We next formulate the access permission problem between the winner femtocell and operators as a Stackelberg game, and theoretically prove the existence of unique equilibrium. As a higher system payoff can be gained by improving individual players’ payoff in the game, each player can choose the best response to others’ action by implementing access permission, while avoiding solving a complicated optimization problem. Numerical results validate the effectiveness of our proposed ASGF based refunding framework and the overall network efficiency can be improved significantly.

Virtualization of 5G Cellular Networks as a Hierarchical Combinatorial Auction

Virtualization has been seen as one of the main evolution trends in the forthcoming fifth generation (5G) cellular networks which enables the decoupling of infrastructure from the services it provides. In this case, the roles of infrastructure providers (InPs) and mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) can be logically separated and the resources (e.g., subchannels, power, and antennas) of a base station owned by an InP can be transparently shared by multiple MVNOs, while each MVNO virtually owns the entire BS. Naturally, the issue of resource allocation arises. In particular, the InP is required to abstract the physical resources into isolated slices for each MVNO who then allocates the resources within the slice to its subscribed users. In this paper, we aim to address this two-level hierarchical resource allocation problem while satisfying the requirements of efficient resource allocation, strict inter-slice isolation, and the ability of intra-slice customization. To this end, we design a hierarchical combinatorial auction mechanism, based on which a truthful and sub-efficient resource allocation framework is provided. Specifically, winner determination problems (WDPs) are formulated for the InP and MVNOs, and computationally tractable algorithms are proposed to solve these WDPs. Also, pricing schemes are designed to ensure incentive compatibility. The designed mechanism can achieve social efficiency in each level even if each party involved acts selfishly. Numerical results show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

Modelling of Key Success Factors for Mobile Virtual Network Operators in Indian Telecommunication Market

Globally, mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) are popular among subscribers in established MVNO markets of America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, where regulatory authorities have allowed them to operate. Their revenues and subscribers have grown fast during last few years. Globally, MVNOs had 134 million customers, with a revenue of more than 25 billion USD in 2014. The Indian government intends to allow MVNOs in the Indian telecommunication market. The government’s approval to allow MVNO’s will open up new opportunities for firms which intend to launch MVNOs. Given the impending introduction of MVNOs in India and its importance, this research article focuses on determining the key factors that will influence MVNOs in India. The study also attempts to identify inter-linkages among various factors and develops a model that would be helpful for industry and academia in getting a better understanding of factors that will drive MVNOs in India. Grounded theory was used to identify the key factors and total interpretive structural modelling (TISM) was used to understand the hierarchy amongst various factors and interpret the relationship amongst them. The identified factors were empirically validated using factor analysis. Key managerial insights were obtained by developing a model for the set of factors, specific to the Indian context. The hierarchical model developed during the study provides a better understanding about relationships between various factors of interest. The research findings can immensely benefit potential MVNOs in identifying the areas they should focus on in the Indian context. Findings report that factors, such as reservation of spectrum capacity by the government, spare radio spectrum, differentiated value-added services (VAS) offered by MVNOs, willingness of mobile network operators, competitive intensity, wholesale tariff regulation, MVNOs’ business strategy and retail tariff, will play a key role in MVNOs’ success in India.

From network sharing to multi-tenancy: The 5G network slice broker

The ever-increasing traffic demand is pushing network operators to find new cost-efficient solutions toward the deployment of future 5G mobile networks. The network sharing paradigm was explored in the past and partially deployed. Nowadays, advanced mobile network multi-tenancy approaches are increasingly gaining momentum, paving the way toward further decreasing capital expenditure and operational expenditure (CAPEX/OPEX) costs, while enabling new business opportunities. This article provides an overview of the 3GPP standard evolution from network sharing principles, mechanisms, and architectures to future on-demand multi-tenant systems. In particular, it introduces the concept of the 5G Network Slice Broker in 5G systems, which enables mobile virtual network operators, over-the-top providers, and industry vertical market players to request and lease resources from infrastructure providers dynamically via signaling means. Finally, it reviews the latest standardization efforts, considering remaining open issues for enabling advanced network slicing solutions, taking into account the allocation of virtualized network functions based on ETSI NFV, the introduction of shared network functions, and flexible service chaining.